May 12--A pair of Western New York coal-burning power plants, which agreed earlier this year to major improvements in pollution controls, ranked among the nation's 50 dirtiest power plants for sulfur dioxide emission rates last year, an environmental group said Wednesday.

The plants -- the Huntley Station in the Town of Tonawanda and the Dunkirk Steam Station -- were the only two New York power plants to make the dirtiest plant rankings compiled by the Environmental Integrity Project, a Washington, D.C., advocacy group.

The Huntley station ranked 30th for sulfur dioxide emissions per megawatt, while the Dunkirk station was 46th out of the nation's 359 largest power plants. The Huntley station also ranked 43rd for its carbon dioxide emission rate and 22nd for its rate of mercury emissions. The Dunkirk station ranked 31st for its mercury emission rate.

The rankings, however, are based on emissions data from 2004 and do not reflect a settlement reached in January between the plants' owner, NRG Energy, and state officials that will reduce sulfur dioxide emissions by 87 percent and nitrogen oxide emissions by 81 percent over the next eight years. State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer had sued NRG in 2002 seeking improved pollution controls.

"I think once all of these changes are in place, we won't be on the list anymore," said Meredith Moore, a spokeswoman for NRG Energy, which owns the Dunkirk and Huntley stations. "We have already been making great strides in reducing emissions."

While the emission cuts won't fully kick in until 2013, the reductions are front-loaded, with 45 percent of the drop in sulfur dioxide emissions scheduled to take place this year, along with 37 percent of the cut in nitrogen oxide pollution. By the end of next year, nitrogen dioxide emissions will be 60 percent lower than they were in 2001, while sulfur dioxide emissions will be down 68 percent.

NRG expects to spend about $70 million to meet the emissions reduction targets, with much of the reduction coming from a switch to cleaner-burning low-sulfur coal. NRG also will install new pollution control equipment and shut four of the Huntley Station's oldest units.

NRG already has started switching to low-sulfur coal, with two of the Huntley station's units already running on the less polluting fuel and "the rest are well along in the process," Moore said.

"We're seeing more state and local action because of the inaction at the federal level," said Ilan Levin, the report's author. "All of these harms coming out of these power plants are avoidable."

The report ranked power plants by how much of a pollutant they released for every megawatt-hour of electricity they produced, bowing to previous objections from the electricity industry that earlier rankings on the amount of pollutants emitted did not account for differences in the size of generating facilities.

Ranking plants based on their emissions for every megawatt acts as an "efficiency yardstick," Levin said.

Scott Segal, the director of the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, an industry group, called the report stilted and misleading, noting that coal-fired power plants are a reliable and affordable source of electricity. "Power plant emissions, along with other indicators of air quality in the United States, continue to improve as part of a trend dating back several decades," he said.

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