Paradise Gas-fired Plant -- Coal plants in the background
From a Report by Glynis Board, Ohio Valley ReSource, WFPL – NPR, July 17, 2017
‘Where Paradise Lay‘
Coal is showing its age. The average age of coal plants in the U.S. today is about 40 years and for the past couple of decades power companies have faced tough decisions about the investments needed to keep those coal-burners going in a way that meets both environmental requirements and economic competition.
Many are opting to phase out coal and instead invest in cheaper, cleaner natural gas.
Some 8,000 megawatts of coal power generating capacity will likely be retired this year. That’s roughly the equivalent of 11 Longview plants. Last year, 13,000 megawatts of coal were retired, many of those before planned retirement dates.
Economists like Walter Culver with the Great Lakes Energy Institute at Case Western Reserve University say the boom in the shale gas supply and development of high efficiency technology to burn that gas are combining to force more coal out of the market. “So now the natural efficiency of generating electricity with gas for the same amount of gas energy as coal energy is about half of the costs, basically,” he said.
That was the strong selling point for TVA President and CEO Bill Johnson, who recently addressed a crowd gathered in Paradise, Kentucky. “It’s a big part of our priority here to diversify our fleet to make sure we are making electricity at the lowest feasible rate,” he said.
David Sorrick, TVA’s senior vice president of power operations, stood near the new 1100 megawatt facility. “Directly behind me is the new Paradise combined-cycle facility,” he said. “And it’s co-located with the unit down the hill, which is our Paradise coal facility.”
Gas power produces far less soot, no mercury, and none of the combustion ash that coal power produces. It also produces 40 to 50 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions compared to the coal unit.
Operations technician Kyle Jones conducted a tour at the dedication ceremony, and proudly pointed out the efficiency features. “The combined cycle portion where we’re using all the heat possible is what makes it so efficient,” he explained. “Our exhaust leaving the stack is as cool as we can make it to use all the energy we could, the most heat transfer possible.”
That even reduces the amount of water needed from the nearby Green River. Steam is returned to liquid form in cooling towers. Huge fans pass air over droplets to cool water until it can be reused.
Jones started at the Paradise coal facility a decade ago and worked his way from conveyer operator to unit operator and now a job at the new gas facility.
“I love it,” he said of the new plant. “It’s a whole lot more clean and makes a world of difference in terms of the work I do.”
Others in the community, however, see trouble in Paradise. At the nearby Paradise Cafe, a stone monument to Kentucky’s coal miners greets visitors at the door. Inside, patrons talked over burgers and BLTs about looming concerns over job losses, either at the TVA facility or the nearby coal mine that supplies it.
The TVA is eager to calm those fears. Sorrick pointed out that even though two coal units were retired here, a third one remains in operation and likely will for decades. However, the new gas facility employs fewer people than the coal plant did. Some employees found work elsewhere in the TVA system.
Health Effects of Power Plants
When John Prine put Paradise on the popular culture map, he was writing about the visible effects of strip mining.
But what Prine couldn’t see then were some of the profound public health effects of burning coal, effects that would take years to measure.
The TVA has been burning coal in Paradise for fifty years. But it started burning a lot more of it in the 1980s, after the public’s opinion of nuclear power changed dramatically. “It was completely related to the partial nuclear meltdown of Three Mile Island in 1979,” Carnegie Mellon University researcher Edson Severnini noticed.
When the TVA took some of its nuclear power generators off line, the power gap was met with coal, specifically, a big increase in the output from the Paradise Fossil Plant. That swap in power generation in the mid 80s provided Severnini an opportunity to study public health impacts in places where coal power generation increased.
He found a striking relationship between the uptick in coal burning at Paradise and a decrease in the size of babies born downwind. “Where Paradise coal-fired power plant was located there was a huge increase in coal-fired power generation, a high increase in air pollution,” he said. “And in that particular location there was a decrease in birth weight by 5.4 percent.”
Severnini’s study was published in the journal Nature in April. He looked at recorded birth weight in the first 18 months after the region’s switch to coal. It was accessible data and birth weight is a good indicator of human health outcomes later in life. Severnini explained that low birth weight can be linked to shorter life spans, higher susceptibility to disease, and even a person’s ability to thrive socially.
“What I wanted people to think about is: What are the consequences of energy choices?” he said.
The Paradise coal facility is now far cleaner than it was in the 80s thanks to stronger requirements under the Clean Air Act and pollution control technology TVA installed. But no matter how you burn it, coal is an organic material dug from the ground and will produce emissions. Recent environmental studies indicate that despite progress in pollution control, soot from coal power plants still accounted for an estimated 7,000 premature deaths each year in the U.S. as of 2014. That’s a lot fewer deaths than the country saw just a decade earlier.
“The cleaner you get that carbon-containing compound you’re burning, the better it is,” said University of Pittsburgh physician and public health expert Dr. Bernard Goldstein. “There are cleaner forms of coal, but none of them are as clean as, say, natural gas.”
Goldstein said despite a lack of data to understand the full health effects of the natural gas industry, it is a significantly cleaner fossil fuel to burn. And gas drillers probably face fewer health risks than coal miners.
“Anytime we’ve had areas that have switched from coal to natural gas there are far less particulates in the air and so the pollution levels have decreased because of that switch,” he said.
Uncertainty Exists Over Gas
But while natural gas offers improvements compared to coal, its environmental effects are proving difficult to fully measure.
Goldstein said he thinks the gas industry, which is highly fragmented, has missed opportunities to clearly address concerns about its own environmental effects. Those include air and water pollution near drilling sites, disposal concerns related to drilling waste, and the greenhouse gas emissions that result from methane leakage.
As a result, any health effects remain to be clearly understood. “For natural gas, the major uncertainties are weighing on the people who live next door,” he said.
Next door to gas drilling, that is. Put another way, the health and environmental risks for the industry’s host communities may take years to observe and measure. And the people of the Ohio Valley may well bear the brunt of those effects to come, just as they have with the effects of coal in the past.
See also: Why Are G20 Governments Financing Coal Over Renewables?
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