Sunday, December 18, 2005

Cover story on power plants in Chicago in the Reader

Mick Dumke has a cover story in the Chicago Reader here on the lack of any progress on a Chicago ordinance to force the two coal-burning power plants in Chicago (Fisk and Crawford, both owned by Midwest Generation, itself a subsidiary of Edison International out of California) to install modern pollution control equipment.

The issue is that these two southwest side plants emit a lot of pollution and the federal government is, under the Bush Administration, not moving to cut pollution anywhere. Thus, it is up to the State or the City to figure out how to cut pollution from these power plants. The same issue extends to just about every Illinois town with a coal-burning power plant, but Chicago's plants are the most residential (I believe).

So far, neither government has done much.

The Blagojevich Administration decided about a year ago to punt on this one, choosing not to impose tough pollution control requirements and instead work on a regional plan with other Midwest state legislatures and governors to come up with a Midwest standard. No word on whether there's been any progress on that front.

On the city side, as the article details, the ordinance has been stuck in committee for four years. Some argue that a city can't impose stricter emissions standards than what federal law allows. I confess I haven't studied the extent to which federal law pre-empts states or cities from setting their own standards, but I can't imagine that a city or a state couldn't choose to set tougher standards to protect the public health of their own people.

That leaves us with figuring out what to do about these plants that employ about 200 people, provide power to about a million homes (a good thing in the event of another breakdown in the electric grid) and make hundreds or thousands of people sick every year.

I've wondered why we can't figure out how to tax pollution to give Midwest Generation a financial incentive to invest in pollution control technology. Currently, the incentives are backward. Each generator sells their power on an open market, and there's no price differential based on pollution generated. In fact, if a generator invests in pollution control, that makes the price of the power more expensive, since the generator needs to include the millions that any modern equipment to control pollution costs into the price of the power that they sell. So the less a power plant invests in pollution control, the cheaper they can produce power and the fatter the profit margin.

One way to deal with this problem is to have the government set a standard for how much pollution power plants can generate. That works best if the federal government sets the standard, because then every generator faces the same constraints. It doesn't work so well if only Chicago has the standard, because then Chicago-generated power is more expensive to sell than power generated elsewhere, and the incentive then is to shut the plant down altogether.

It seems to me that a state tax on pollution would make some sense, since it would affect each plant equally and it lines up the incentives to cut pollution in order to make more money.

Of course, there is no correct answer as to how much to tax one ton of NOx or one pound of mercury or how to calculate the tax for a pound of radioactive waste from a nuclear plant, but that shouldn't stop us from coming up with our best guess (or let the ICC come up with a good guess) to keep Illinois plants profitable but give them a strong reason to invest the millions in pollution control equipment.

After all, as ComEd moves ever closer to its long-awaited retail rate hike in 2006, there ought to be a way that the public gets something out of the deal too in terms of fewer cancer deaths.

6 comments:

Anonymous,  8:33 PM  

Maybe your master Victor Reyes owns or lobbies for the polluters.

Dan Johnson Weinberger should be ashamed he got bought by HDO.

Anonymous,  8:41 PM  

Look into the Daley family investment in nuclear power plants and the sweetheart deal with ComEd

Making The Wheels Turn 9:48 PM  

Well, first off, if you really restrict or worse, totally eliminate those two coal fired plant's electric production with all those capacity eating pollution control gear (and btw, generating capacity gets eaten up big time by scrubbers), where are you going to get the power to replace the lost output from those 2 units?

According to what I'm told, the transmission capabilities into the City proper are currently running at close to the max limits, and there's little, if any excess capacity. And as I remember, that transmission capacity is owned by ComEd, not Excelon (so no deep pockets).

Why leave those coal fired plants alone? If you can't "wheel" power into the city because you are transmission constrained, what's the alternative?

ComEd spent over 10 years trying to expand transmission capability through the Western suburbs, and got a ton of grief, and eventually gave up (in 2003, if I remember correctly).

Really, the only real alternative to increase transmission capacity into the Chicago metro area at this point is to "re-string" those existing transmission towers with new, higher capacity cable, and not only is that very, very expensive, but it's probably not practical (can't just add new cables to what's already there, because it's unlikely the towers can handle the added weight, and can't just remove the existing cables from the start, because then it's blackout time for all the users). And we can't get new transmission towers - just spent the last 10+ years trying that angle, so we can't just take transmission lines temporarily out of service.

You talk in terms of "fewer cancer deaths" - imagine what happens when there's extended electric power blackouts due to insufficent transmission capacity.

Btw, it would probably be TENS OF "millions in pollution control equipment", with the end result being LESS electric power available.

Course, you could always "dot" Chicago with, let's say, 10,000 windmills (the 800 Kw. units are about 200 feet high, while the 1.2 Mw. units are about 250 feet high).

Ring them 3 deep around the City-County Building, and require Rod to give three press conferences a day in Daley Plaza.

No easy answers to this one, and that's why NONE of the pol's want to get anywhere near it.

Dan Johnson 10:18 PM  

Man! Another anonymous poster that doesn't like HDO. But, Making The Wheels Turn, that is another part of the story I'd heard but hadn't read as concisely as you put it. I heard that in a few years, somehow, transmission capacity into the city on existing wires is going to increase dramatically. That's about as far as my technical knowledge goes. Anyone else know more about that aspect to the story? And on meeting demand, it does seem like there's a need for more conservation money to get spent. We don't have a serious conservation campaign, because the utility no longer has any financial interest in reducing peak load (aside from some money for municipalities through the Clean Energy Foundation), at least, that I am aware of. So, another question: are you saying that without Fisk and Crawford, Chicago is likely to have extended blackouts?

Making The Wheels Turn 1:27 PM  

"...transmission capacity into the city on existing wires is going to increase dramatically."

Dan, I've got to tell you that I think that's not correct. New transmission cable, probably. But achieving that on the existing cable would probably require changing the basic laws of thermodynamics, and I don't see that happening anytime soon. But, maybe there's something out there I'm not aware of.

See, the problem is heat buildup when you move electricity by transmission cable. The more power you move by cable, the more resistance (heat) that occurs on that cable. The way that's been gotten around in the past is to use bigger copper cables for power transmission, sometimes oil filled for cooling. But obviously, makes the already heavy cables even heavier, so the towers can't handle the weight.

Now, the other option is to weaken, or even eliminate the resistance (heat) occurring from moving the power. Well, THAT'S a really big time goal, and that's why there's been such a pursuit by the electric power industry for getting reliable (out of the lab) room temperature superconductivity - That's the "Holy Grail" in the biz.

If you can make and reliably use transmission cables made out of materials offering consistant room temperature superconductivity performance, well, then a whole lot of our nationwide electric power issues go away.

Just something to think about.

Dan Johnson 3:04 PM  

Thanks wheels. That's helpful. I did hear there was one main bottleneck into the city from the suburban nuke plants that they are working on, and when they increase that bottleneck, then the transmission problem largely goes away, but maybe that's not right. The MSM should write about that one!

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