By Tom Schuster, Director, Sierra Club Pennsylvania Chapter
On June 2, the two towering smokestacks at the Cheswick Power Station in Allegheny County came toppling down, coughing up one huge, but final cloud of pollution, downing power lines and subjecting the residential neighborhoods immediately across the street to one more headache as they clean up and restore their properties.
I am not a demolition expert, but I have to wonder whether this implosion, with the environmental violations that resulted, could have been done in a lower-impact way. Still, area residents that we had worked with for many years are happy to see the stacks, and the continuous pollution that poured out of them for over 50 years, gone for good.
Our Beyond Coal Campaign’s work to hold this plant accountable for its pollution was an important factor in its retirement, and dates back to 2014. Over the course of seven years, we worked to tighten several key state and federal regulations on air and water pollution, and to force updates to the plant’s permits to ensure those new regulations were enforced. When those permits and regulations were insufficient, we sued and often won. When we started the campaign, the plant was not even operating its existing controls for nitrogen oxides (NOx, an air pollutant that causes ground level ozone or smog). By 2017, these emissions were down by more than half, and in 2020 we won a lawsuit that would ultimately reduce them by half again. In 2015, the plant’s expired water pollution permit had no limits on the amount of heavy metals and other toxins present in coal ash that could be discharged into the Allegheny River, upstream from an intake for the regional water authority. Our lawsuit to correct that deficiency not only led to strict new limits, but also exposed the fact that the plant had for years been violating its permit by dumping super-heated water into the river.
Over the course of this campaign, we worked with residents to document their struggles with pollution from the plant, and promoted stories like this video from Esquire, and this photo exhibit that help to bring home the personal effects of the plant’s pollution. Overall, we probably got around 100 media hits over the course of the campaign, covering hearings, lawsuits, enforcement actions, and just general problems people were facing.
In the end, the work proved that when you force coal-fired power plants to clean up or prevent their pollution that causes massive harm to the public, they cease being a cheap source of energy and can’t compete with cleaner sources. That is true now more than ever, as a recent study found that every coal-fired power plant in the country (with one exception) is more expensive to run than it is to replace with new solar or wind power within the same region as the plant.
Coal’s decline in Pennsylvania has come quickly - in 2010 we got more than half our power from 63 coal-fired generating units. Today we get less than 10% of our electricity from coal, and with the retirement of Homer City Generating Station on July 1, the only units remaining without a planned retirement date are those that specialize in burning coal refuse left behind by old abandoned mines.
It is critical that we do not leave communities behind in the wake of this transition. We are currently engaging with residents and community leaders around the Cheswick plant to push for a planning process for what comes next at the site, which is surrounded on three sides by residential neighborhoods. The Inflation Reduction Act included tax credit bonuses for clean energy projects at power plant sites, and both Cheswick and Homer City are strong prospects for this type of development. But beyond the site redevelopment itself, we also need to provide broader support for workers, local businesses, and local governments that relied on the tax revenue from these plants. An opportunity for that exists with allowance proceeds from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which would have generated over $1 billion in total proceeds since it was finalized last April, were it not for a court order preventing enforcement while an appeal of the law is heard.
The transition away from coal to clean energy is great for our climate and for our health, and it could also be an economic boon throughout Pennsylvania - even in coal country - IF we take advantage of opportunities instead of clinging to the past.
This blog was included as part of the July 2023 Sylvanian newsletter. Please click here to check out more articles from this edition!