WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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Hours after the lawsuit was filed, IPL announced their compliance with EPA’s allegations and said that they would reduce their emissions at the Petersburg plant. Following this, EPA announced that Morgan County’s air quality is officially within federal standards.
The lawsuit has sparked interest on how the switch from coal to natural gas will have a significant effect on the air quality and the health of the surrounding community in Indianapolis. Coal-fired power plants such as IPL have been contributing to a nationwide issue of air pollution.
In the past decade, coal has been the fastest-growing energy source in the world. According to endcoal.org, between the years 2001 and 2010, the world consumption of coal increased by 45%.
Kerwin Olson of Citizens Action Coalition and Janet McCabe of IU’s Environmental Resilience Institute spoke out about the murkiness of government regulation for power plants and how that can affect not only the state but the country in terms of pollution and human health and enforcement for these companies.
“It’s absurd that a corporation could be allowed to violate their permit that frequently, that often and really face no consequences as a result. It’s a sad state of affairs for the regulatory regime not only in Indiana but also the country as a whole,” Olson stated.
McCabe went on to say, “and those situations can lead to a lot of extra pollution that might have been preventative if the source had gone through a permitting process.”
Filed by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, the complaint stated that IPL “failed to obtain the necessary permits and install the controls necessary” to reduce emissions that damage human health and the environment.”
Details of the complaint made for violating the Clean Air Act included evidence of notices of violations that the EPA made to IPL in September of 2009, September 2015 and February of 2016.
The utility released comments to IndyStar stating, “While IPL believes the actions at issue were taken in full compliance with the Act and applicable permits, it entered into the settlement agreement to resolve EPA’s claims and avoid uncertainties associated with litigation.”
On December 9th of last year, the Indianapolis Power and Light Company announced that they would be shutting down two of their biggest units at the Petersburg Super Polluter coal plant by the year 2023.
The EPA recognized these plans and has explained that if IPL retires the two units before July 1st of 2030 then it will not need to install a new pollution control device -mentioned in the consent decree.
The settlement made Monday is subject to a 30-day public comment period on the Department’s website and will still need final approval by the court.
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Executive Director of Citizens Action Coalition, Kerwin Olson spoke on behalf of the organization and explained how the lawsuit affects not only the companies and organizations involved but also the state and the health of Hoosiers and the environment in Indiana.
“With a permit, it only matters if someone is checking and frequently with air permit violations, those violations are initially noticed because of the opacity of smoke coming out of the smoke stacks. The oversight is pretty lax. Not enough air monitors set up, not enough inspections, and for the most part our regulatory regime is a self regulated regime if you will. It’s sort of a trust with very little verify,” He said.
Olson explained to me the reason why coal is not the most efficient and even cheapest source of energy now, with the future looking more green than ever:
“There’s the carbon emissions, methane emissions, and the impact on climate change. Indiana has certainly played a big role in exacerbating climate change over the years with our reliance on coal. That doesn’t include the…other toxic air emissions being emitted that cause significant problems with asthma, breathing difficulties. There’s other toxic metals being emitted into the water that pollute our waterway.”
According to Greenpeace, coal is the single largest contributor to climate change with one-third of all global carbon dioxide emissions coming directly from burning coal.
Power plants that burn coal have been contributing to the air and water pollution for decades which leads to many negative health effects for humans.
“Coal fired power plants are dirty… and there’s better ways to generate energy that are cheaper for customers, better for our health and better for our environment. Coal is the worst of the worst if you will, and it’s time to get rid of it,” Olson stated.
In the early 1900s, oil and natural gas became competitors with coal being cleaner and easier to transport and store. By the mid 1900s oil and gas began being widely used in space heating, electric power generation and transportation fuels.
Alternatives to coal-powered energy include solar and wind power, the two popular renewable energy sources to date. The main attraction is how clean these natural sources are.
Fortunately, Indiana has been on the move to “pivoting away from coal” recently, said Olson.
In June of this year Vectren Energy announced their plans to switch to renewable energy for power generation, and only being 20% coal-based in just a few years. The company provides electricity for roughly 145,000 Hoosiers in Southwestern Indiana.
Nipsco Energy also recently announced their plan to be 100% coal free by 2028.
Olson explained that the transition from coal energy to cleaner fossil fuels is largely one due to economics and a higher demand rising for renewable energy. In terms of the lawsuit, he said it seems that this is pulling IPL away from coal more than EPA’s demands.
“So we’re seeing coal plants retire early across the state of Indiana largely because they’re no longer the least cost resource to serve customers. So what’s going to have implications for IPL is the fact that we’re in the midst of an energy transition largely due to economics, coal is now one of the most expensive options and we’re slightly phasing it out. And so it’s really the marketplace economics that’s driving these coal plant closures above anything else,” Stated Olson.
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Director of Indiana University’s Environmental Resilience Institute and Professor at IU Mckinney school of law, Janet McCabe provided her educated insights on the subject. McCabe has spent a career in air quality, environmental regulation and policy, having worked at Indiana Department of Environmental Management
for air quality and the US EPA office of air and radiation.
McCabe stated that air pollution has been in communities and in Indiana since the country moved into the industrial age and explained how creating laws such as the Clean Air Act in 1960 to protect public health and the environment has created a “really clear but pretty flexible and workable framework for the federal governments and the state governments to work together to reduce air pollution in states across the country.”
“We still have a ways to go but we have these important laws in place that help us make sure that people are doing the right thing and not burdening the public with health and environmental impacts without doing as much as possible to reduce those,” McCabe said.
In the lawsuit, EPA made allegations that IPL was committing two types of violations. One was that the company made changes at the facility that should have gone through a permitting review and two that when emitting pollution, they violated the opacity limit which is how much smoke a factory or powerplant can emit. McCabe stated that they are “Both important and serious requirements.”
McCabe explained the importance of having enforcement present with issues that have to do with damage to the environment:
“Enforcement is important. It’s good to see the government moving forward to settle these violations. Every enforcement case is different, and fact specific so it’s very hard for me to say the penalty is just right.. I can’t really comment on that. Enforcement actions are supposed to do what they can to correct the environmental harm that happened but also provide a disincentive for the company to violate in the future and systems allow for the companies to, instead of paying all of the fine money, to use some of that to do something good to help reduce air pollution or address air pollution in that location.”
The lawsuit includes a penalty in the form of $1.5 million and building an alternative energy source on the property and buying property and giving it to the Patoka National Wildlife Refuge.
In terms of fairness, McCabe said that she questions whether the penalty is enough to make up for years of pollution damage:
“When the government does these consent decrees they have to put them up for comment and I don’t know if anyones going to comment but if I were going to comment on it the kinds of things I would want to look into would be ‘Does this penalty seem in line with other penalties that the agencies have levied for these kinds of violations?’ and as I said that’s often hard for…If IPL is planning to move away from these coal units anyway… its not that much of a penalty for them because it’s something they were planning on doing anyways.”
McCabe went on to ask the question of whether the community was involved in the lawsuit before making final or more final decisions,
“The other question that I would have is did the agencies consult at all with the community around this plant in determining these supplemental and environmental projects… and I don’t know the answer to that either.”
When looking at the big picture with air pollution, McCabe explained why it is important for everyone to learn about and how it affects not only the people near a power plant such as IPL but just people living in a modern society that has come to terms with its high pollution since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
“We all benefit from electricity. We use it all the time and it’s really important for modern society, but we’re all affected by the pollution from these plants, but some are affected more than others. The people who live near these plants are more affected by the day to day air pollution… the extra sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide that people breathe during these time periods and the asthma attacks they had… you cant get those back. So a really important thing is that enforcement is there to make sure that companies don’t do this in the future and that other companies see that if they don’t comply with the law that somebody will catch them and make them fix it and make them pay a penalty. So that’s a fairness thing for other companies that arent working hard to comply with the law. So it’s important for people to know about this, it’s important for people to know that an important role of government is to watch over these plants because there’s no way for regular people to tell… a regular person looking at a power plant would have no idea whether they were complying with the law or not so you need the government to do that and you need them to follow through.”
McCabe went on to explain that although government enforcement is important, it is also critical that the community affected by lawsuits such as this have the rights and availability to voice their concerns and opinions:
“But the government process should be as transparent as possible too, so that citizens have the ability to make their own judgement about whether the government is doing a good enough job. The public comment process is really important there and if organizations like yours aren’t covering these stories, how is the general public going to know that there’s a public comment section out there.”
The future of renewable energy looks promising, and the fear of climate change alone has motivated many government officials to support renewable energy projects with incentives and has pushed companies such as IPL to make the transition as well.
Assuming IPL follows this trend of going towards renewable energy, they could be contributing to a brighter future for the health of new generations.
