Orlando Utilities Commission should guard against pollution from coal plant
Turning coal into electricity is dirty business. Across Florida, coal ash and gritty residue are buried in soupy, often unlined pits or piled into towering ash mountains — sending particles of toxic dust swirling through communities and creating a slow, steady seep of pollutants into the aquifers that provide Floridians’ main drinking-water supply. Every single coal ash waste site in the state is leaking hazardous chemicals into the air, the groundwater or both, official records of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency show.
Even worse, the official records only tell half the story. As reported last week by Inside Climate News and WMFE Orlando, the 2015 law that requires monitoring of coal-ash dumps doesn’t apply to sites that were already closed — a loophole that the Orlando Utilities Commission took advantage of by shutting down some coal-ash storage just before the deadline at its Stanton Energy Center located east of Orlando. That can, and should, change; these dump sites didn’t disappear, and they should be monitored and cleaned up, especially since state and federal agencies already knew about a history of pollution from the plant going as far back as 2003, according to a report by the advocacy groups Environmental Integrity Project and Earthjustice. A 2018 lawsuit filed by several nearby homeowners claimed that OUC’s ash carried a “unique contaminant fingerprint,” including heavy metals and radioactive material, that caused a spike in the levels of blood and brain cancers in the area. That suit, which has been dismissed, also cited a company that OUC hired to manage the ash.
The Stanton plant (which also provides power to Lake Worth, Winter Park, Mount Dora, Chattahoochee, and Lakeland) isn’t the worst in Florida, and on its website OUC describes several environment-protecting measures, including state-of-theart technology to minimize emissions, and its current treatment of coal ash to render it “environmentally stable” and non-hazardous. But OUC prides itself on being a green utility, and its customers have a right to expect the company to confront the threat of pollution from its older stockpiles instead of relying on the 2015 cutoff date.
They also deserve to know why OUC is still, despite all the safeguards, using coal — and why it plans to keep doing so until it shuts down Stanton’s two units in 2025 and 2027. If the utility can stop using coal before then, it should.
It’s notable that FPL, the state’s largest electric utility, has been buying coal-fired generation plants just to shut them down, sometimes within just a few years. In June, the company imploded its last Florida coal plant, located in Martin County, and a few weeks ago it deactivated one of four units at the nation’s largest coal-fired power plant, located in Georgia ( it owned that unit jointly with JEA, the Jacksonville-based municipal utility).
We’ve had plenty to say about FPL’s decision to pour cash into shadowy political groups, but it’s hard to criticize the company’s commitment to clean energy.
Beyond that, the federal and state governments, along with utilities, must become more aggressive about the massive problem presented by coal ash — one of the most abundant, and least regulated, pollutants in the United States. Because utilities have stalled this long, pollutants have leached into the nation’s water supply, putting public health at risk. Across the nation, proximity to coal-ash dumps has been associated with significantly higher rates of cancer, neurological disorders and other health problems. And that’s not counting the well-documented health and environmental impacts associated with the process of mining coal.
There was a time when — even with all its drawbacks — many communities saw coal as one of the best, most affordable options for generating electricity. But there are much better choices now, including natural gas and solar power. (Ironically, OUC’s 175-foot pile of coal ash is now crowned with a solar array that provides enough energy to power more than 2,000 homes.) It’s time to retire coal, and invest in cleaning up the damage it’s done in communities like ours, and throughout the nation.