Water and Air Victory: 2,700 MW of Coal Power to be Retired

Good news! Today the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy released a press update highlighting the historic settlement between the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and EPA over a Clean Air Act dispute, which lead to the planned retirement of 2,700 MW of TVA's 17,000 MW total capacity of coal fired power by the end of 2017.

Making up the 2,700 MW of coal energy to be shut down will be all ten coal fired units at the Johnsonville facility, units 1-6 at the Widows Creek facility and units 1 and 2 at the John Sevier facility. The press update quoted Dr. Stephen Smith, Executive Director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy and member of TVA's Integrated resource Planning Advisory Group, saying: "We applaud the settlement reached... this is particularly good news, because Johnsonville and Widows Creek (facilities) were (the) oldest, dirtiest and least efficient plants in TVA's coal fleet."

The settlement also calls for a total investment of $350 million by TVA in Alabama, Kentucky, North Carolina and Tennessee clean air projects, as well as the requirement for more than a dozen other TVA coal fired power units to install sulfur-dioxide scrubbers by 2018. Now, I'm all for reducing the carbon emissions of coal fired power - and correct me if i'm wrong - but to my knowledge carbon scrubbing or carbon capture and sequestration processes require an additional massive consumption of water, almost doubling the water requirements for coal fired power production.

Can't we just eliminate all coal fired power already?!!!