EPA Dumps TX State Emissions Plan; Will Require 15 Coal Plants To Actually Make Improvements

[hatrack]

The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday rejected parts of a key Texas clean-air plan, setting up a conflict with deep implications both for the state’s electricity mix and air quality across much of the country.

The partial rejection of Texas’ regional haze plan, a federally required strategy for reducing pollution that causes hazy skies, would require 15 coal-burning generating units at eight Texas power plants to install or improve controls that limit emissions of sulfur dioxide.

The plants are mostly upwind of urban North Texas, meaning their emissions often drift to the metropolitan area and further north to Oklahoma. They include Luminant’s Big Brown, Monticello and Martin Lake plants. Luminant spokesman Brad Watson said the company was reviewing and analyzing how the EPA’s 267-page proposal would affect its plants.

EDIT

Critics of the state’s plan, which was prepared by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, noted one detail: the time it would take to achieve clear skies over Texas’ two big national parks, Big Bend and Guadalupe Mountains. “Waiting more than a century until 2155 as TCEQ proposed to do to return clear skies, is simply unacceptable,” Cyrus Reed, acting director of the Sierra Club’s Texas chapter, said in a statement.

EDIT

http://thescoopblog.dallasnews.com/2014/11/epa-rejects-a-texas-clean-air-plan-orders-pollution-upgrades-on-some-big-coal-plants.html/

[Fred Sanders]

1. Texans will just let God clear the skies of pollution and the land of liberals.

[riversedge]

2. I saw a photo of one the National partks--filled with haze

or air pollution. Wished I had saved it.