San Antonio activists aim to ax plans for new coal-fired power plant

San Antonio Express-News --Nov. 10

Nov. 10--Local environmental activists out to stop City Public Service's new coal plant have vowed to start a grass-roots campaign similar to the one levied against the failed PGA Village.

"This is something that's just too important to us," said Tamara Apgar, a member of Smart Growth-San Antonio. "We don't want pollutants in our air.

It is kind of a no-brainer to me."

About 20 of that group's members and Karen Hadden, executive director of the Austin-based SEED Coalition, met Tuesday night to discuss how to fight the proposed 750-megawatt plant.

They decided to immediately start contacting every neighborhood, political, community and church group possible to build support against the facility.

Smart Growth and other opponents helped to doom the PGA Village plan when they gathered more than 77,000 signatures in an attempt to put that project to a vote.

The state will release the plant's draft permit later this month and hold a public meeting on the issue sometime in December. A public hearing likely will follow in late winter or early spring.

"Public input is going to matter," Hadden said. "That's why anything and everything citizens do matters."

Chief among the activists' complaints is that the plant would spew another 140 pounds of mercury, a dangerous neurotoxin, into the air each year.

The group also argues that the roughly $1 billion needed to build the facility could be better spent developing energy-efficiency programs and cleaner power sources such as wind and solar production.

Power company officials said the activists' arguments are off base.

The new plant, which is scheduled to run by 2009, would be the fourth on Calaveras Lake. Even with the addition, all the complex's pollutants, including mercury, will be reduced over the next 10 years through a $316 million pollution-control project, said CPS Director of Research and Environmental Management Joe Fulton.

He said that would make the plants the cleanest in the country.

Jim Nesrsta, the utility's director of generation planning, said much of the issue boils down to basic economics.

Like all Texas utilities, CPS quit building new coal plants in the early 1990s in favor of cheaper and cleaning-burning natural gas plants. But natural gas prices have fluctuated wildly in the past few years and are currently at more than $7 per million BTUs, which is about seven times the price of coal, Nesrsta said.

Meanwhile, clean coal technology has improved. With 250,000 new people projected to move to the area over the next decade, Nesrsta doesn't see any alternative.

"It is absolutely needed," he said. "Even though homes are being built more efficiently and appliances are more efficient, just the number and size of homes being built are going to take more energy."

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