| By Bernie Woodall
LOS ANGELES, Dec 1 (Reuters) - California must insist that U.S. western
states that supply it with electricity clean up coal-fired power plants
that pollute cities, national parks and alpine forests, several
environmental groups said in a study issued on Thursday.
California imports 21 percent of its electricity from out-of-state
coal-fired power plants, said V. John White, executive director for the
Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technology and one of the
study's authors.
The study, "Clearing California's Coal Shadow from the American West",
calls on California to insist that coal power plants that supply it with
electricity burn cleaner. It also urges California to carry through with
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's ambitious plans to reduce greenhouse gases by
2050 to 80 percent of 1990 levels.
The study says existing coal power plants that feed California
electricity each year release 67 million tons of carbon dioxide, as much
as 11 million automobiles. And they release 200 times the mercury than all
power plants in California.
California may soon require that any new coal-fired power plant from
outside the state meet strict clean-burning requirements if its owners
want to sell electricity into California.
"Right now, we are at a confluence," said Vicki Patton, attorney for
the Denver-based Environmental Defense.
"Two great legacies of California are colliding -- the long history of
California having led the nation to clear-air solutions ... with this long
history of California's reliance on high-polluting coal plants in distant
Western states."
More than 30 new coal-fired plants are on the drawing board, with a
sharp eye to serving California, said White.
The power generated by the new plants would be between 14,000 megawatts
and 20,000 megawatts, said John Barth of the umbrella environmental group
Western Clean Energy Campaign.
But if they are built as currently designed, Barth said, emissions from
the plants "would cancel out all global warming reductions that have been
made in California".
But states such as Wyoming that want to build the coal plants have
options other than selling power into California, said Steve Waddington,
executive director of the Wyoming Infrastructure Authority, which was
established by the Wyoming legislature last year to push for development
of Wyoming's energy resources.
| "Markets other than California are just
as hungry and growing," Waddington said.
He points to an effort announced several weeks ago by Arizona
Public Service, the biggest utility in that state, to build
transmission lines from Wyoming to Arizona capable of running up to
3,000 megawatts of electricity.
And the stricter requirements won't work, Waddington said, because
coal from many areas, including Wyoming, can't be used in plants that
meet the same standards as combined-cycle natural gas plants.
White said that California's economic power can hold sway over
power plants built in other states.
"California can send the signal to the marketplace that it will
only buy power from new coal plants with the very best technology,"
said White.
The marketplace may speak otherwise, said Waddington, when
Californians find that their electricity bills keep rising without the
benefit of relatively low-cost power generated from coal power plants.
A proposed policy that may be adopted by the California Public
Utilities Commission (CPUC) would require that investor-owned
utilities such as Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas &
Electric only enter into long-term contracts for new coal-fired power
plants if they are as efficient as modern natural gas-fired power
plants.
Municipal utilities such as the Los Angeles Department of Water and
Power do not come under the CPUC's jurisdiction. But Eric Tharp,
spokesman for the LADWP, said the utility seeks to increase the amount
of power it uses from renewable sources.
While 21 percent of California's electricity is met by coal-fired
power plants, the LADWP imports between 40 percent and 50 percent of
its power needs from coal-fired plants.
The report was issued by the Center for Energy Efficiency and
Renewable Technologies, Western Resource Advocates and Environmental
Defense. It can be viewed at www.environmentaldefense.org/go/californiacoal.
© Reuters 2005. All Rights Reserved.
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