Coal-fired power plants to close after wastewater rule
Climate change isn’t what’s driving some U.S. coal-fired power plants to shut down. It’s the expense of stricter pollution controls on their wastewater.
Dozens of plants nationwide plan to stop burning coal this decade to comply with more stringent federal wastewater guidelines, according to state regulatory filings, as the industry continues moving away from the planet-warming fossil fuel to make electricity.
The new wastewater rule requires power plants to clean coal ash and toxic heavy metals such as mercury, arsenic and selenium from plant wastewater before it is dumped into streams and rivers. The rule is expected to affect 75 coal-fired power plants nationwide, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Those plants had an October deadline to tell their state regulators how they planned to comply, with options that included upgrading their pollution-control equipment or retiring their coalfired generating units by 2028.
The national impact of the wastewater rule is still coming into focus, but at least 26 plants in 14 states said they will stop burning coal, according to the Sierra Club, which has been tracking state regulatory filings. Twenty-one of the plants intend to shut down, and five indicated they may switch to natural gas, the environmental group said.
“The free ride these plants have been getting is ending in a lot of ways,” said Zack Fabish, a Sierra Club lawyer. “And them choosing to retire by 2028 probably reflects the reality that a lot of the subsidies they have been getting in terms of being able to dump their wastewater into the commons, they are not going to be able to do that in the future.”
The rule will reduce the discharge of pollutants into the nation’s waterways by about 386 million pounds annually, according to EPA estimates. It’s expected to cost plant operators, collectively, nearly $200 million per year to implement.
Nationwide, about 30% of generating capacity at coal plants has been retired since 2010, according to the Energy Information Administration. (Coal use at power plants is expected to surge more than 20% this year because of sharply higher natural gas prices — the first such increase since 2014 — but the energy agency said it expects that trend to be temporary.)