Homer City coal plant receives SO2 emissions limit

June 4, 2013 | By Barbara Vergetis Lundin

An appeal of an air quality permit for the Homer City Generating Stations filed in 2012 on behalf of the Sierra Club has been settled.

Caption: Western Pennsylvania's Homer City Generating Station. Credit: użytkownik angielskiej/Wikimedia Commons

The Homer City power plant was the largest source of sulfur dioxide (SO₂) pollution in the country in 2010, emitting more than 109,000 tons of SO₂, making it the largest source of SO₂ emissions in the country that year.

The power plant will now be subject to an hourly limit for SO₂ production -- a precedent-setting settlement. In the settlement, the Homer City plant will accelerate air quality modeling to determine the impacts of SO₂. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has agreed to a timeline for a permit revision to ensure compliance with the SO₂ health standard. After review of the company's modeling data, DEP has added new permit conditions limiting combined SO₂ emissions from the three generating units to 6,360 pounds per hour, including during periods of startup and shutdown, and prohibiting more than one unit from operating simultaneously in high-polluting startup mode.

"The new clean air protections at Homer City provide critical protections against sulfur dioxidesets an important standard for other clean air fights across the country," said Mary Ann Hitt, director of the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal Campaign. As we continue the fight to replace old dirty energy sources with clean renewable ones like wind and solar we must make sure to limit the dangerous pollution from our remaining coal-fired power plants."

NRG Energy Services, a wholly owned subsidiary of NRG Energy, Inc., took over operations and maintenance of the Homer City Generating Station from an affiliate of Edison Mission Energy. The plant is owned by Edison International.

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