By Doug Richards, WXIA
JULIETTE, Ga. — From a distance, Plant Scherer looks like a nuclear plant. But it’s actually a coal plant located north of Macon. It’s identified by environmentalists as the dirtiest power plant in America.
“Georgia Power has been allowed to dump dangerous carbon into the air forever,” said Colleen Kiernan of the Sierra Club’s Georgia chapter. She says the Obama administration’s new regulations would force Georgia Power to cut back its carbon dioxide emissions by more than forty percent over the next decade and a half.
But Kiernan says Georgia Power has already made impressive strides toward cleaner power.
“Since 2005 Georgia has already reduced carbon dioxide emissions by 22% at our power plants. So we’re already well on the way. And you can tell our air is cleaner,” Kiernan said. “We have far fewer smog alert days than we used to in the early 2000s.
But coal is cheap, plentiful and produced in the US. Nine of Georgia Power’s plants are coal-fired, producing 35 percent of the state’s power. But Georgia Power is shutting down most or all of three of its coal plants in the next year.
“The mix is changing. With the retirements of a number of coal units, our percentages will shrink in terms of coal. But coal remains a vital source,” said John Kraft, spokesman for Georgia Power. As to Plant Scherer, Kraft says it gets dubbed “dirtiest” because it is one of America’s largest coal plants.
Because it is almost prohibitively expensive to clean up the emissions from coal plants, the new regulations are expected to force power companies to shift the emphasis of their power sourcing away from coal to other cleaner sources by 2030.
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