Grant fuels Orlando, Fla., utilities commission plan for coal plant
The Orlando Sentinel, Fla. --Oct. 21
Oct. 21--Orlando expects to nail down a $235 million federal grant today to build another power plant in east Orange County fired by coal, a fuel increasingly regarded as loaded with toxic pollutants, damaging to the global climate and due for phasing out.
The project, with a total cost of $570 million, won't burn coal directly but
will extract a synthetic gas -- much like natural gas -- that will fire
generators at OUC's Stanton Energy Center just east of Orlando.
In 1996, OUC started up the second of two coal plants at the Stanton center.
Many observers predicted at the time it would be the last coal generator built
in the state and that natural gas would become the fuel of choice.
But with rising prices for oil and natural gas, and large supplies of coal
available for mining in the United States, utilities are changing their
attitudes.
Many of coal's notorious pollutants, including mercury and the suspected
global-warming ingredient carbon dioxide, can be dramatically reduced through
the gas-producing process.
"This is not a coal-fired plant of the industrial revolution but of the
21st century," said DOE spokesman Mike Waldron in Washington, D.C.
The Orlando utility, which serves 190,000 customers, can generate 1,600
megawatts and expects demand for power to increase by 600 megawatts in less than
a decade.
To meet the need for additional power, OUC plans to build gas-fired
generators at the Stanton plant in four phases between 2008 and 2013.
Southern, which developed the project's technology for extracting gas from
coal, will own 65 percent of the coal-fired generation system.
The federal assistance, to be announced by Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham
and Gov. Jeb Bush, is part of President Bush's efforts to promote development of
"clean-coal" technologies -- a goal shared also by presidential
candidate Sen. John Kerry.
None of the project participants would freely offer details Wednesday,
deferring official word of the grant to Abraham.
A DOE notice of Abraham's planned announcement claims the project will be
"one of the cleanest, most energy-efficient coal plants in the world."
Ken Cook, spokesman for the League of Conservation Voters office in Orlando,
branded the federal grant as politically motivated.
"This is obviously an attempt to use taxpayer dollars to advance the
president's campaign," Cook said.
Holly Binns of the Florida Public Interest Research Group in Tallahassee also
criticized use of tax dollars.
"There is no such thing as clean coal," Binns said. "We should
not be subsidizing profitable companies using dirty fuels. We should be
subsidizing truly clean, truly renewable fuels."
However, the Natural Resources Defense Council conceded that the kind of coal
plant pursued by the Orlando utility can serve as a transition during the
decades it may take to develop cleaner sources of energy.
"The system has the ability to get very good performance, including
removal of mercury," said David G. Hawkins, director of the NRDC's Climate
Center in Washington.
His chief concern was that OUC and Southern will not take full advantage of
the potential to remove carbon dioxide from the system.
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