Mississippi Coal Plant Documents Unveiled For the First Time

When speaking about environmental health and quality on a state-by-state basis, Mississippi is not the first to come to mind. In fact, it usually ranks as one of the least environmentally friendly states, keeping in line with its other superlatives of poorest, most conservative, and most obese state in the nation. The Mississippi Chapter of the Sierra Club has worked to dissuade these harmful labels by way of their efforts to implement more clean energy policies .

Since March 2013, Mississippi Power (MP) ratepayers in Biloxi, Gulfport, Hattiesburg, and other cities in the state have seen massive spikes in their electric bills, leaving many in a dire financial situation. As a result of the Baseload Act of 2008, which is a state law that gives utilities the authority to steal money from ratepayers and transfer it to the power plants, even if they are unfinished or haven’t been built yet. The Mississippi Supreme Court finally utilized its judiciary power and issued a ruling that forced MP to reimburse the $281million it unscrupulously gained in the 2013-2014 fiscal year from its 186,000 ratepayers, going so far as to raise the overall price on a monthly basis to $61,000,000.

Louie Miller, senior organizing representative with Sierra Club Mississippi, reveals that the Baseload Act would “change 65 years of case law and allow them(MP) to start charging customers in advance for building something known as an Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC)  ‘Clean Coal’ plant with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS).” Seen as a revolutionary technology that would help to reduce dirty emissions, it was also seen as economic boost because it used lignite coal, a brown deposit found throughout most of the Southeast and noted for its high moisture content and low energy yield. According to Miller, it takes more energy to dry the coal than to burn it.  

All of this money is funneled into the Kemper Project Coal Plant, an electrical generating station in rural Kemper County, located in east-central Mississippi, close to the border with Alabama. First constructed in June 2010 and licensed under MP (a Southern company subsidiary), the plant has the distinction of being not only the most expensive power plant ever built per-wattage-of-energy- generation ($5 billion), it is also the first plant to implement gasification and carbon capture technologies. While viewed by the coal industry as a compromise that should appease environmentalists and those beholden to the industry, it is ultimately an empty glad-handing , as a clean coal plant is non-existent and impossible and is responsible for creating a “War on Coal.”

The EPA, which appealed to the plant workers to implement the new rules outlined in President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, claims that the Kemper County Energy Facility stands as an example that promotes burning the dirtiest of fossil fuels while still making the cuts in carbon dioxide emissions needed to avoid a climate catastrophe. These rules are the main pillar of the president’s plan to fight climate change by reducing the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions:  the country's power plants.

EPA administrator Gina McCarthy has remained intractable on the inclusion of Kemper and other projects that will supposedly offer a place for coal under the new climate change plan.

"Rather than killing future coal, these new rulings actually set out a certain pathway forward for coal to continue to be part of a diverse mix in this country," she said when announcing the new standards.

“The project’s carbon footprint is essentially the same or maybe even less than a natural gas plant that doesn't have carbon capture," said Randall Rush, the Southern Company engineer who spent over twenty years working to help build and officiate the plant. 

The project was being promoted across the political spectrum from former Republican governor Haley Barbour to the Obama administration, Department of Energy, and EPA. His influence on the project spread far and wide, and he essentially became a spokesperson for the Kemper project.

“We’ve said this project from Day 1 has been a politically-driven project, and you don't win environmental issues in Mississippi unless it's based on economics,” says Miller. “This project makes sense in a regulated utility environment, but isn’t economically sound unless every ratepayer would get a 10-12 percent return-on-investment (ROI)”.  

Culminating in a drawn-out court case between MS Power and the state court system, the project was deemed to be exceeding its authority as originally outlined in the legislature.