Mindy Lubber

Mindy Lubber, Contributor


Green Tech
7/22/2011 @ 1:01PM |3,721 views

Time to Replace Eisenhower-Era Power Plants

Coal Fired Power PlantIf you had to choose between a Model T and a new Ford Fusion, which would you buy? It’s a no brainer, isn’t it? You’d buy the Fusion, just as you’d choose a Blue Ray TV over a 1950s Black and White.

Most of us won’t put up with decades-old technology. Yet when it comes to our electricity, we’re stuck with last century’s dirty and inefficient power plants—even though cleaner and newer technologies are available.

It’s time for our electric power industry to embrace the 21st century with modern, cleaner power generation sources like wind and solar, natural gas and energy efficiency—and leave the 20th century’s increasingly uneconomic coal plants behind.

Rules to update the federal Clean Air Act this year are testing the power sector’s readiness to seize the future. After a long and heated debate, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finally enacted the so-called “cross-state air pollution rule,” which limits sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions, pollutants linked to asthma, bronchitis and heart attacks.

Now up for consideration is the “air toxics rule,” which limits mercury and other hazardous air pollutants from power plants.

Once again opponents are voicing the same tired argument that power companies need a lot more time to comply, even though they’ve known the rule was coming for more than a decade. Some—like American Electric Power—are pulling out all stops to delay the rule, which they say will destroy jobs, raise energy prices and slow economic growth.

That’s nonsense. Studies show the EPA rule is technologically feasible, provides clear economic benefits and offers power companies an opportunity to modernize their aging fleets.

The power plants most endangered by these air pollution rules are the nation’s smallest, dirtiest, least-efficient plants. Most are more than 50 years old.

Post Your Comment

Please or sign up to comment.


  • mccpetroli mccpetroli 2 years ago


  • fredlinn fredlinn 2 years ago

    @ energysage

    N.R.C. Lowers Estimate of How Many Would Die in Meltdown

    —” You evidently don’t know the difference between a tsunami and a flood, and your logic against nuclear power hasn’t improved since my last post”—–

    You want to play semantics, ok, definition:

    Noun: An overflowing of a large amount of water beyond its normal confines, esp. over what is normally dry land:

    Noun: A long high sea wave caused by an earthquake or other disturbance.

    A tsunami is a flood. Water that was normally in the confines of the ocean shore floods dry land, sometimes where nuclear power plants are located.

    I haven’t needed to change my logic against nuclear power since your last post—and your reference to the NRC changing their estimate(guess) of how many people would die in a nuclear meltdown does nothing to change my opinion that nuclear power is too dangerous—-because with wind or solar power, there can be no meltdown, the number of people who would die as a result of a disasterous wind or solar “meltdown” is 0. Wind and solar are safer.

    I’ve never heard of anyone, anywhere, at any time who has ever successfully built a weapon out of a wind turbine or a solar panel. However, a large percentage of nuclear reactors have been used to produce nuclear bombs. A great deal of rhetoric and media coverage has been expended lately to convince me that Iran and North Korea have plans to do so. I don’t see much evidence to dispute those claims.