YES: New rules will cost rate payers, eliminate jobs and slow recovery.
By Thomas A. Fanning
Southern Co. and our Georgia Power Co. subsidiary are the leading energy suppliers in the Southeast and among the largest in the nation.
We’re committed to working with our communities, our customers and other interested parties to continue to reduce any environmental impact of our generation.
We live and work here, too. We want a clean environment. We also want what everyone else wants — the lights on at affordable prices. A healthy economy relies on reliable electricity at costs that people and businesses can afford.
Last month, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued a nearly 1,000-page proposed regulation on even further reductions of emissions from coal-fired power plants. It covers 125 different types of emissions.
The proposal is complex. It contains stringent limits and requirements that must be met in an unreasonably short, three-year time frame. A study conducted for the Edison Electric Institute concluded that by 2015 about 200,000 megawatts of additional environmental controls would be needed nationally to meet the EPA rule.
As the CEO of a company that has installed more emission controls than any other utility, I tell you this cannot be done in three years.
The rule would be costly. Estimates show that in the Southeast alone electricity prices could rise as much as 25 percent.
The cost of adding more controls plus the cost of replacing the coal plants — that would likely shut down — with other types of generation would require utilities to spend up to $300 billion by 2015. This expense would certainly show up in power bills and threaten U.S. economic recovery.
And reliability could suffer. Bernstein Research predicts that regional capacity margins would plummet, resulting in a greater risk of power outages.
Then there’s the impact on jobs. The rule could drive utilities to replace coal with natural gas, with enormous social consequences. For the same amount of generating capacity, there are six times as many jobs at a coal plant than a gas one. As much as 80,000 megawatts of coal generation could be shut down by 2015, potentially impacting 40,000 jobs.
And that’s just in our industry. You also have coal mining, railroads and equipment vendors that would be impacted. Those jobs would go away, too. And think about the tax base that would be lost to those communities, many in rural areas.
Please know that people in my industry already are thinking carefully about making a transition to other types of fuels for electricity generation. But we don’t need to manufacture artificial burdens that hurt our customers and weaken our nation’s ability to create jobs and improve the economy.
Some will argue that Southern is among those who have had years to deal with these emissions and that we’ve dragged our feet and delayed long enough.
If having invested more than $8 billion dollars in environmental controls with plans to spend up to $4 billion to comply with existing, revised or new rules over the next three years is considered “dragging our feet,” then I guess I don’t understand the definition of foot-dragging. Those investments already have lowered emissions 70 percent, with more reductions to come.
We all want cleaner air and affordable, reliable electricity. But this latest EPA proposal, if adopted, could put the reliability and affordability of our electric supply at risk.
We need a realistic compliance schedule — based on historical experience — that allows this additional work to be done in an orderly fashion without placing reliability in jeopardy or imposing undue cost increases on our customers.
Thomas A. Fanning is chairman, president and CEO of Atlanta-based Southern Co.
NO: Delays will lead to more adverse health consequences.
By John Walke
If we could prevent 34,000 premature deaths, 22,000 heart attacks and 2.6 million sick days, most of us would.
So why then is Atlanta-based Southern Co. lobbying to delay clean air standards that would do just that?
This month, Southern CEO Tom Fanning himself came to Washington to appeal to a congressional subcommittee to delay Environmental Protection Agency standards that would achieve dramatic reductions in mercury, arsenic, lead, dioxins, acid gases and deadly particulate matter — the dangerous stuff spewed from oil and coal-fired power plants like Southern’s.
Forty years after the Clean Air Act was enacted, half of Southern’s power plant units still lack basic pollution control equipment called scrubbers that reduce the most deadly forms of air pollution.
Other utility companies, from Duke Energy serving the Carolinas and Midwestern states to Constellation Energy serving Mid-Atlantic, New England and other states, have said they stand ready to comply with the standards on time.
Not Southern.
It’s not as if the company hasn’t known these standards were coming, since they are more than a decade overdue.
But Southern has chosen to continually put off cleaning up all of their dirtiest power plants, and now wants to continue the delay even longer.
In the meantime, people continue to die, get sick and miss work and school because of the pollutants that Southern and other power companies spew into our air.
Even the unborn are harmed. Each year in the United States, more than 300,000 newborns may have been overexposed to mercury in utero, increasing their risk of neuro-developmental effects.
Power plants that burn coal are the largest industrial emitters of mercury pollution in the country.
Sharply cutting mercury pollution will help reduce these effects from mercury poisoning.
As a public health advocate for a national health and conservation organization, I summarized these consequences during the same congressional hearing where Fanning appeared this month.
The written and oral testimony presented on behalf of Southern did not dispute this huge health toll. Remarkably, Fanning’s testimony did not even acknowledge the profound health consequences of the delay he is urging Congress to execute.
I was born in Georgia and raised in South Carolina. I refuse to believe the good people of this region, including the company’s workers, support blocking clean air safeguards that will prevent this much death and human misery.
Southern’s website highlights the motto, “Think Bold. Act Sure.”
The public deserves to know why Southern’s “boldness” does not include taking responsibility for its air pollution and the consequences, while it “acts sure” that we won’t notice how much our public health is suffering.
John Walke is director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Clean Air Program in Washington.
