Randy Francisco, Sierra Club, Pennsylvania, 412-802-6161
Anna Frazier, Coordinator, Diné CARE, 928-380-7697
Rob Disney, Sierra Club, Las Vegas, 702-518-0188
COAL PLANT FAILS IN PENNSYLVANIA COAL COUNTRY
Health Risks and Controversy Remain At Sites in NM And NV
KARTHAUS (PA) – An international energy developer financed by the giant equity firm, the Blackstone Group, has abandoned plans for a proposed 300 megawatt waste-coal power plant in rural Pennsylvania.
Sithe Global, which is also behind the proposed Toquop coal plant in Nevada and the Desert Rock plant on the Navajo reservation in New Mexico, announced on Tuesday they were canceling the $600 million River Hill plant near Karthaus, Pennsylvania due to financing difficulties.
Progress on Sithe’s other two coal projects has also stalled as a result of permitting and financing difficulties, along with intense opposition from local communities that have alleged the potential harm to their air, water and health far outweighs any economic benefits, and that the company should instead be investing in innovative clean energy sources.
“We have suspected for a long time that the River Hill project was very tenuous at best,” said Randy Francisco, of the Sierra Club in Pennsylvania. “It says a lot about the viability of these dirty coal plant proposals when they can’t get taxpayer bailouts and they can’t make them pencil out even with the backing from a company the size of Blackstone.”
Anna Frazier, coordinator for Dine’ CARE said that the Desert Rock plant is also on equally shaky ground after losing their air permit from the EPA, their permit for the transmission right-of-way needed to get the power to southwest markets, and also being denied their request for $450 million in federal stimulus dollars, all in just 2009.
“The Navajo communities of Northwest New Mexico have always been opposed to Sithe Global’s proposed Desert Rock plant so we are encouraged by the cancellation of the River Hill project,” said Frazier. “In an area that is already under siege from the pollution from fossil fuels development, Desert Rock has been a six-year black hole that has wasted millions of dollars that could have been used to bring clean-energy projects to our region.”
Sithe’s proposed Toquop plant near Mesquite, Nevada, originally proposed as a natural gas-fired plant, has been on the drawing board for years but still does not have a pollution permit, an approved BLM environmental study, and last year lost the rights to water it needs for plant operations.
“We’ve been trying to persuade Sithe for years to focus on developing Nevada’s vast solar and wind resources instead of outdated and dirty coal,” said Mesquite Mayor Susan Holecheck. “Hopefully, Sithe’s decision to abandon the Pennsylvania plant is a signal that we can soon put the nail in Toquop’s coffin, too, and get it out of the way for clean-energy jobs and economic development in Nevada.”
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All fish caught in U.S.-tested streams have mercury
Sport fishers, take heed: A government test of fish pulled from nearly 300 streams in the USA found every one of them contaminated with some level of mercury.
The research by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) marks its most comprehensive examination of mercury contamination in stream fish. The study found that 27% of the fish had mercury levels high enough to exceed what the Environmental Protection Agency considers safe for the average fish eater, those who eat fish twice a week.
But the findings in wild-caught fish underscore how widespread mercury contamination in the nation's waterways has become. Previous research has found levels of concern in ocean and lake fish.
Both air quality and visibility would be affected in the Great Basin National Park if one or both of two coal-fired power plants were operated in White Pine County, a Government Accountability Office report said.
The park, created in 1986 as a representative 77,000 acres of the larger Great Basin, has some of the cleanest air and best visibility in the United States, the GAO report said.
Lincoln County's water district and its partner in water resource development, Vidler Water Co., charge in a new lawsuit that the state engineer's office was biased against them with a ruling potentially thwarting their development plans for desert land north of Mesquite.
In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court Tuesday, the water district north of Las Vegas and the company complain that State Engineer Tracy Taylor and Acting State Engineer Jason King violated their constitutional rights to due process with an April ruling.
A coalition of environmental groups launched a campaign today aimed at persuading investors in new coal-fired power plants to invest in renewable energy instead of coal.
Ten environmental groups are hoping to convince the investment company Blackstone Group LP and its subsidiary Sithe Global to drop plans for three new coal-fired power plants, citing concerns about emissions of carbon dioxide and other pollutants, as well as other environmental and economic concerns.
Environmentalists and politicians are turning up the heat on coal plants proposed by the investment giant.
By
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, senior writer
NEW YORK (Fortune) -- Throughout the West - in Colorado, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming - battles are raging over proposed coal plants. Caught up in two big ones is The Blackstone Group, the global asset manager than went public last year.
Blackstone (BX) owns 80 percent of Sithe Global Power, an independent power producer. Sithe wants to build a 1,500-megawatt plant, known as Desert Rock, on land governed by the Navajo Nation in New Mexico. It also wants to build a 750-megawatt plant called Toquop in southeast Nevada.
DENVER - Backers of the proposed Desert Rock power plant have asked a federal appeals board to reinstate the plant's air-pollution permit, which the Environmental Protection Agency took back in April.
Meanwhile, Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter pressed his argument against the New Mexico power plant to the White House's senior environmental official this week at a meeting in Park City, Utah.
Desert Rock took its case to the EPA's Environmental Appeals Board last Thursday, calling the permit revocation "unprecedented."
"The board's decision in this case will reflect on the integrity of EPA as an institution and its respect for basic notions of fairness and due process," wrote Jeffrey Holmstead, lawyer for Desert Rock.
The Desert Rock Energy Project is run by the Navajo Nation and New York-based Sithe Global. It would put a coal power plant on Navajo land near Shiprock, the same region as the existing Four Corners Power Plant and San Juan Generating Station. By some measures, the two existing plants are some of the nation's dirtiest.
Just days before Christmas last year, an environmental disaster one hundred times the size of the Exxon Valdez (yes, you read that right) unfolded on a riverbank in eastern Tennessee. A wave of poisonous sludge buried a town…along with the myth of clean coal.
Late december was rainy and cold in east Tennessee, the temperature ricocheting from freezing to mild, and maybe that had something to do with it. Maybe the rain saturated all that ash, and tiny rivulets bore into the dike and then froze in the cold and expanded and thawed and froze and expanded again. Or maybe the weight of the wet ash, the downward force of it, was more than the lateral force the dike could withstand and overrode the friction that held the walls in place.
The dike was not merely breached. It did not spring a leak. It collapsed, most of the northern and western walls disintegrating into mud and mush just before one o’clock in the morning on December 22. When it fell away, the wet ash behind it—more than a billion gallons of gray slurry, a hundred times more than the oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez—gushed out with the fury of a reservoir bursting through a dam, which, really, was exactly what it was.
“You know how people always say a tornado sounds like a freight train?” says Travis Cantrell, who lived in the trailer above the dock where his uncle Rick sat out all night fishing. “That’s what it sounded like.”
Mohave Generating Station Owners to Dismantle Plant
June 10, 2009
Media Contact: Gil Alexander, (626) 302-2255
ROSEMEAD, Calif., June 10, 2009 – The owners of the Mohave Generating Station in Laughlin, Nev., including Southern California Edison, today announced the decision to decommission the station and remove the generating facility from the site. During the coming months, non-generating equipment and facilities will be dismantled. Then, in 2010, the plant’s generating equipment will be removed and its operating permits terminated. The site’s transmission switchyard and some related facilities will remain in place.
