Backcountry Notes

If you are like most folks I know who don't live in coal country, what you know about the Dominion Power Virginia City electricity-generation plant now under construction in Wise County is that it is such a dirty mess that a judge "nixed" its mercury-emission permit in August. What the environmental groups who loudly patted themselves on the back for this "win" didn't mention, and what the newspapers which printed the story without investigation didn't seem to know, is that Dominion Power had agreed to amend the permit to meet the mercury-emission limit more than a year ago. So like everything else about coal power, what you think you know is wrong.

Facts are not important for most "environmentalists;" their thing is self-serving public relations, not saving the environment.  And as we should know by now, newspapers never let the facts get in the way of a good story. I'm not an "environmentalist," I'm a conservationist, and I believe that actual results are more important than hubris.  So let's take a look at the Virginia City plant.

We have a huge reserve of coal in the ground and the available technology is much, much better than the old-tech plants which continue to operate. The Dominion Power 585-megawatt Virginia City coal-fired facility now under construction in Wise County, Virginia, provides a prime example of what can be done:

1. The Virginia City plant will produce slightly more than 600 tons of sulfur dioxide annually. By way of comparison, an old-tech 650-megawatt power plant in Chesapeake, Virginia, produces 30,892 tons of sulfur dioxide per year. An adjusted per-megawatt comparison shows that the new technology being used at the Virginia City plant reduces sulfur dioxide emissions by more than 97 per cent.

2. The Virginia City plant will be the site of a carbon capture demonstration project, the results of which will be useful for other facilities similarly situated. See Dominion's news release for a description of the project.

3. In return for the permit issued by Virginia, Dominion Power will convert two old coal-fired units of its Bremo Bluff power station in Fluvanna County to natural gas. See Air Board Unanimously Approves Permits; Dominion Proposes to Convert Bremo Power Station From Coal to Natural Gas to Improve Virginia Air Quality. The Bremo Bluff facility produces 254 megawatts of power and currently emits 8,543 tons of sulfur dioxide annually -- so the conversion will mean a net reduction in SO2 emissions of 7,943 tons per year.

If we were to stop subsidizing wasteful, ineffective alternative-energy projects and instead encourage and subsidize the building of plants like Virginia City in return for conversion or decommissioning of old, low-tech plants, emissions of harmful substances like SO2 would plummet. Most of the infrastructure for mining and moving coal by rail has been in place for decades. Alternative-energy proposals for generation of electricity, by comparison, involve such environmentally-unsound measures as erecting windmill generators along Appalachian ridgelines which are migration routes for songbirds, raptors, and Monarch butterflies. Can we generate solar electricity in Western deserts and build huge wind farms on the High Plains? Sure we can . . . but virtually no one lives in those places and the environmental cost of building 1,000-mile-long transmission lines is high.

One more comment about the mercury-emission business: aside from the litigation being an unnecessary waste of time and money, since Dominion had already agreed to the limitation, "environmentalists" seem to have no complaint about the mercury contained in CFL bulbs, which is just as toxic as the mercury from a power plant.  See CFL Bulbs Have One Hitch: Toxic Mercury.  Most CFL bulbs which burn out are being tossed into the trash, where they end up in landfills.