FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Date: June 11,2008
CONTACT: Cesia Kearns, Organizer, Sierra Club National Coal Campaign
Office: 612-659-9124
Email: cesia.kearns@sierraclub.org
Otter Tail Power Needs to Clean Up Their Act
Sierra Club Challenges Violations of the Clean Air Act at
Big Stone Coal-fired Power Plant
Minneapolis, MN - Today the Sierra Club took action to force the Big Stone coal-fired power plant to employ modern pollution controls. Over the past decade, the existing plant’s owners have repeatedly modified the 30-year old plant to keep it operating past its retirement date without ever installing modern pollution controls. Modern pollution controls being employed by other utilities in the country would cut the Big Stone plant’s emissions by over 90 percent.
“Otter Tail Power needs to clean up its act before it sinks billions of dollars into another polluting project,” said Bruce Nilles, Director of the Sierra Club’s National Coal Campaign. “The desire of this company to double the size of a project that has been polluting illegally for over a decade shows a great disregard for public health and environmental quality,” added Nilles.
Ranked with data from the Environmental Protection Agency, Otter Tail Power’s Big Stone I plant stands as the dirtiest coal plant in the country for smog pollution (primarily nitrogen oxides) once Xcel Energy’s Riverside coal plant finalizes the conversion to natural gas in 2009. This can be found at http://dirtykilowatts.org/Excel/DirtiestNOX2.xls
The plant’s owners between 1995 and 2005 undertook major modifications and life-extension projects at its existing plant without notifying state regulators, without obtaining a new permit, and without installing modern pollution controls. These changes not only extended the life of the aging coal plant, the changes also increased emissions of nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, and fine particulate matter - pollutants that contribute to serious health problems such as asthma, lung cancer and heart disease. The Sierra Club uncovered the violations during a year-long investigation into Otter Tail Power’s plans to build another massive coal plant--the proposed Big Stone II project--and new transmission lines to carry the power across Minnesota.
Public pressure to pursue alternatives to expanding Big Stone II has increased significantly as doubt about the viability of the project has grown. Recent events, including the listing of the
“This is about choosing wise energy investments that protect public health, not endanger it,” said Cesia Kearns, Organizer with the Sierra Club’s National Coal Campaign, “There is no reason to build another outdated coal plant in the U.S. today when energy needs can be met without subjecting our children to bad air and the impacts of global warming. We can simply do better than Big Stone.”
Otter Tail Power contends that it will be improving air emissions with the expansion of Big Stone II, which does nothing to address the decade of excess pollution it has been emitting when other utilities are using better controls than the applicants propose. “We wouldn’t accept an 8-track tape player being sold to us as the latest sound technology,” said
In addition to opting for less than the best available pollution controls, the co-owners are failing to acknowledge carbon dioxide as a pollutant in contradiction to the Supreme Court ruling in April. In the application for the air permit in
The Sierra Club suit filed today charges the three co-owners of the plant, Otter Tail Power, Montana Dakota Utilities and Northwestern Corporation, with violations of the federal Clean Air Act. As an outcome of the lawsuit, Sierra Club is seeking enforcement of the Clean Air Act which would mean Otter Tail Power and other co-owners will have to install modern pollution controls and be subject to penalties of up to $25,000 a day for each day in violation.
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