Unit 2 At Cholla Power Plant Will Be Retired On October 1Sep 23 - Pan African News Agency
Arizona Public Service Company officials have informed The Tribune-News of the firm's intent to file with the Arizona Corporation Commission its decision to halt all energy production at Cholla Plant Unit 2 beginning Thursday Oct. 1 . According to APS Corporate Communications spokesperson Steven Gotfried , the filing was scheduled to be formally submitted Sept. 11 . "We will be closing Cholla Unit 2 as scheduled in April 2016 . In advance of closing the unit, we are going to stop production at the unit on Oct. 1," Gotfried said. Under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) final rule informally issued Aug. 3 , all states have a Sept. 6, 2016 , deadline to submit to the EPA preliminary strategies on cutting carbon emissions from their electrical power systems by 32 percent on average below 2005-year levels, essentially mandating a wholesale conversion from coal-fired power generation to natural gas and renewable energy sources. If the EPA approves the proposals, the states would then have two more years to complete the offered switchover. If states fail to make the initial submission, EPA officials say they will suggest their own plans of what states will have to do. Gotfried explained that APS' latest decision is not based on the EPA's Clean Power Plan. "The reason for retiring the unit is that we don't use Unit 2 much during the winter months, so it really makes sense to take it offline in October," he said. Gotfried pointed out that the retirement of Unit 2 ahead of its final closure stems in part from APS' disappointment with the response it received from the EPA two years ago on APS' compromise proposal to improve the state's air quality. "Despite the Regional Haze Rule (under the Clean Air Act) giving the state of Arizona the responsibility to reduce human-caused visibility impairment in national parks and wilderness areas, the EPA on Dec. 5, 2012 , published a final federal implementation plan, which overrides certain parts of Arizona's plan to deal with the same issue. "What they said was that they were going to require that Units 2, 3 and 4 add Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) technology to control nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions. Our response was to petition the EPA to reconsider the rule, and to challenge in court the EPA's legal authority to override the State of Arizona's plan for managing regional haze," he said. This step occurred on Feb. 1, 2013 , when APS filed a petition for review with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals . On March 19, 2013 , APS asked the same court for a stay of the rules until the petition was decided. The stay was denied on Sept. 19, 2013 . Gotfried continued, "Once that occurred, we began looking at what we could do that would be in the best interest of everyone involved. We believed those scrubbers were going to be extraordinarily expensive and, quite honestly, would not accomplish the results we'd hoped for. We began to look at whether it was still financially viable to keep the plant running. "What we did on Sept. 11, 2014 , was announce, instead of adding SCR to those units, we would be closing Unit 2 by April 2016 , and stop burning coal at Units 1 and 3 by the mid-2020s." APS officials contended in a 2013 statement that the EPA plan did not sufficiently address the air visibility issue, asserting by the firm's own analyses that even if the Cholla plant followed the initial federal implementation plan requirements, there would be no discernible improvement in visibility on the Colorado Plateau. Citing the EPA's admission that its air pollution control model is flawed, APS' statement then asserted, "For more than seven years EPA has known its visibility model is broken. In the 2005 regional haze rule, EPA stated that "~the simplified chemistry in the model tends to magnify the actual visibility effects of that source.' A new model, which EPA should use instead, is available. It is wrong for the agency to use a flawed model just because it provides the desired outcome," it said. panafricannews.blogspot.com |