Fossil fuel groups and Big Ag team up to support a massive coal export terminal – ThinkProgress

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Good news has been hard to come by as of late for Lighthouse Resources Inc., a coal company that has been trying for years to build the largest coal export terminal in the United States. In the last year, state regulators in Washington have repeatedly denied the project key permits, leaving some to question whether the terminal will ever be built.

But now a few allies of Lighthouse Resources have stepped up to urge a court to overturn the state regulators’ denial. On Thursday, four major industry groups — the National Mining Association, the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Farm Bureau Federation, and the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers — submitted a brief to a federal court in Washington urging the court to overturn the state regulators’ permit denials.

“To do otherwise would be an invitation to states across the country to begin legislating their own foreign policy, in flat contradiction of the Framers’ plans and Supreme Court’s teachings and disrupting national and international trade policies of all sorts,” the brief read.

The groups argue that by denying permits for the construction of the terminal, state regulators are effectively acting as a veto power over certain kinds of industry that they don’t like. The regulators, for their part, have defended their decisions by arguing that Lighthouse Resources Inc. and Millennium Bulk Terminals — a bulk materials port owned by Lighthouse — have failed to make a compelling economic and environmental case for the terminal.

“After extensive study and deliberation, I am denying Millennium’s proposed coal export project,” Washington Department of Ecology Director Maia Bellon said in a press statement last September, when the state announced its decision to deny the project a crucial water quality permit. “There are simply too many unavoidable and negative environmental impacts for the project to move forward.”

Lighthouse and Millennium have been trying to build the coal export terminal since 2012, as part of a wave of fossil fuel infrastructure proposals that hit the Pacific Northwest after 2010. The terminal, which would be located in southwest Washington along the Columbia River, and could handle 44 million tons of coal annually, is the last remaining active coal export terminal proposal in the Pacific Northwest.

In its final environmental impact study of the project, the Washington Department of Ecology found that the terminal would both significantly increase greenhouse gas emissions and disproportionately impact low-income and minority communities that live near the proposed site.

According to the study, the terminal — which would greatly increase train traffic through the community of Longview, bringing as many as 16 coal trains a day to local lines — would significantly increase the risk the rate of cancer near the terminal, due to increased diesel emissions from rail cars . The proposed terminal site is located near a low-income and predominantly minority community, which the study estimated could see cancer rates increase from 30 cases for every million people annually to 50 cases for every million.

But the industry groups argue that since the export terminal is directly tied to both international and interstate trade — with coal coming from the Powder River Basin region of Wyoming and Montana and bound for overseas markets in Asia — state regulators are prohibited from intervening due to the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which holds that only Congress can regulate trade.

The brief also argues that the Department of Ecology overstepped its mandate in denying the water quality permit because it is only supposed to consider how the project would impact the state’s water quality, not other environmental factors.

“The American Farm Bureau Federation joined the amicus brief because the legal issues raised in this case are much broader than this export facility and coal, they are important to agriculture as well,” Danielle Hallcom Quist, senior counsel for public policy with the American Farm Bureau Federation, told ThinkProgress via email.

“Agriculture is heavily dependent on foreign trade and access to port facilities, particularly on the West coast,” Hallcom Quist continued. “If a state were to oppose the export of agricultural products … through its borders, that decision would be very harmful to farmers and ranchers and valuable export markets that are critical to the agricultural economy.”

So far, supporters of the terminal have had mixed success in challenging the denial of the two permits in court. In October, a judge with the Cowlitz County Superior Court told the state Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to either approve a lease permit that it had previously denied the project, or explain its reasoning for the denial. The DNR appealed that decision, and that case is set to be heard by the state Pollution Control Board in late September.

In late April, however, the state Shoreline Hearings Board — which hears appeals pertaining to decisions that impact the state’s shoreline — rejected Millennium’s appeal of the two permit denials, agreeing with the state’s conclusion that the project would create unavoidable ecological harm.

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Coal and nuclear plant owners wrap themselves in ‘resilience flag’ to draw Trump’s attention – ThinkProgress

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Until 2017, the “resilience” of the electric power sector had referred to the power grid’s ability to withstand and recover from extreme weather and other threats.

But the Trump administration, as it has with so many other issues, succeeded in distorting the meaning of the word and changing the conservation to reflect the priorities of the president and his political benefactors. Integral to this effort was when President Trump’s Department of Energy began equating grid resilience to a region’s ability to ensure there would be a plentiful amount of coal and nuclear generating capacity.

A new report, commissioned by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and the Natural Resources Defense Council, (NRDC), seeks to debunk claims made by the Trump administration about the relationship between grid resilience and coal and nuclear plants.

This comes at the same time as electric grid operator PJM Interconnection announced it will be conducting a study over the next few months “to understand the fuel-supply risks in an environment trending towards greater reliance on natural gas.”

One of the main takeaways from this week’s report by EDF and NRDC — “A Customer-Focused Framework for Electric System Resilience” — is that generation-related solutions, like keeping dirty coal and uneconomic nuclear plants online past their retirement dates, are the least-effective for improving resilience.

Generation and fuel supply shortages rarely cause customer outages and are not good at providing many essential reliability services, according to the report. Instead of wasting time and customers’ money using grid resilience as a reason to keep uneconomic coal and nuclear generators afloat, policy-makers should focus attention on creating more durable distribution systems, the report said.

In conjunction with the release of the report, John Moore and Gillian Giannetti, two attorneys at the NRDC, wrote Thursday in a blog post that coal and power plant owners have “wrapped themselves in the resilience flag” in an attempt to justify profit guarantees for their financially struggling resources.

Moore and Giannetti, who also work for the Sustainable FERC Project, said that issues with fuel supply — coal, uranium, natural gas, water, wind, and solar, for example — account for only 0.00007 percent of total grid disruptions. The Sustainable FERC Project is a coalition of state, regional, and environmental organizations pushing the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to support policies that benefit clean energy resources.

We agree — the study is a fantastic read. https://t.co/oASmcArltm https://t.co/6TAm08WqYP

— Gillian Giannetti (@GillianEnergy) May 3, 2018

So far, President Trump and his industry supporters have failed in their effort to reverse the fortunes of the coal and nuclear generation sectors. But Energy Secretary Rick Perry and the president still have certain powers at their disposal to help owners of coal and nuclear plants.

Perry, for example, could use his authority as head of the Department of Energy to spur emergency compensation for coal and nuclear plants run by FirstEnergy Solutions that may be at risk of shutting.

The Trump administration also reportedly has been exploring using the Defense Production Act of 1950 to help coal and nuclear plant owners. The law gives the president broad powers to require businesses to prioritize contracts for materials deemed vital to national security. In this case, electric grid operators and utilities could be forced to purchase power from coal and nuclear plants if Trump invokes the act.

As the administration ponders whether it should take drastic measures to help the owners of these power plants, the new report attempts to pull the conversation back to what it sees as the most relevant factors behind grid resilience.

Throughout the report, its authors emphasize that since most outages occur due to problems at the distribution level and since long-duration outages are caused primarily by severe weather events, measures that strengthen distribution and hasten recovery are highly cost-effective.

In contrast, measures to make power generation more resilient “are likely to have little impact on outage frequency, duration or magnitude,” according to the report.

The report was prepared by a trio of consultants: Alison Silverstein of Alison Silverstein Consluting, and Rob Gramlich and Michael Goggin of Grid Strategies LLC.

The authors seek to bring a “customer-centric framework” to the conversation on grid resilience, one that includes customer-sited energy efficiency and distributed generation and storage.

“Power system resilience should be measured from the end user’s perspective — how many outages happen (frequency), the number of customers affected by an outage (scale), and the length of time before interrupted service can be restored (duration),” the authors write. “And since long outages do occur, we should also consider customer survivability as an important element of resilience preparations.”

As the debate raged in 2017 over Perry’s proposal to get federal regulators to approve subsidies for troubled coal and nuclear plants, confusion emerged over the definition of grid resilience. The report’s authors aim to clear up any misunderstanding.

Power system reliability and resilience are deeply intertwined. According to the authors, reliability covers those long-term and operational steps that reduce the probability of power interruptions and prevent loss of customer demand, while resilience measures reduce damage from outages and hasten restoration and recovery to shorten outage durations.

Utility performance will define resilience

The primary factor defining grid resilience will not be the availability of coal or nuclear plants, according to the report. Grid resilience will be determined by the performance of electric utility operations at the distribution level.

Damage to power lines, poles, and transformers — major components of an electric distribution system — are what cause 90 percent of electricity service interruptions, according to DOE data.

Over a two-year period in the mid-2000s, for example, Florida was slammed by one major hurricane after another. The storms wreaked havoc on the state’s electric power system. In response, the state’s electric utilities made a commitment to hardening their systems to prevent similar widespread outages the next time a storm hit the peninsula.

Since 2006, Florida Power & Light has invested more than $3 billion to build a more resilient grid. After a decade of limited hurricane activity in the state, last year’s Hurricane Irma was the first major test for the company since Hurricane Wilma hit in 2005.

“Our investments were invaluable,” Florida Power & Light CEO Eric Silagy wrote in an article published in the January/February 2018 issue of the Edison Electric Institute’s Electric Perspectives magazine. “Fewer than half as many substations were affected and those that were impacted came back online more quickly.”

Even though Irma was a larger and stronger storm than Wilma, the company’s new automated switching system avoided nearly 600,000 customer interruptions. The fury of Irma knocked out power to 90 percent of FPL’s customers, but all of its customers had their power restored within 10 days compared to 18 days following Wilma.

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Toxic coal ash ponds are at serious risk of flooding – ThinkProgress

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More than a dozen ponds containing coal ash — the toxic byproduct of burning coal — are located in flood zones throughout the United States, putting them at risk of flooding during storms or high water, according to a report released this week by a coalition of environmental and public interest groups.

The report comes as the Trump administration seeks to weaken standards for coal ash disposal at the request of industry, rolling back the first-ever federal regulations on disposal for coal ash.

“Putting billions of gallons of toxic coal ash next to our rivers and drinking water — that’s just an accident waiting to happen,” John Rumpler, senior director of Environment America’s clean water program and co-author of the report, said in a press statement. “We should be phasing out these toxic pits. The last thing we should be doing is weakening the few standards we already have in place to limit their pollution of our waters.”

Coal ash is the second-largest form of waste in the United States, with more than 100 million tons produced each year. To store coal ash, coal-fired power plants — which tend to be located near water sources used for cooling the power plant’s equipment — combine the ash with water and store it in pits, known as coal ash ponds.

Historically, these pits have been unlined, leading environmental groups to raise concerns about whether toxic compounds found in coal ash — like lead, arsenic, and mercury — could be leaching into nearby groundwater. Those fears have largely been backed up by industry data, which has shown elevated levels of toxic pollutants like arsenic and radium in the groundwater near more than 70 coal ash disposal sites across the country.

But the report from Environment America raises concerns beyond groundwater contamination. It warns that fourteen coal plants with onsite coal ash storage ponds are located within Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) 100-year flood zones, meaning that the area is reasonably expected to flood at least once a century. These plants generate 8.4 million tons of coal ash each year, and at least six of those ponds have been designated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to be in poor condition.

“While hundreds of coal plant sites across the country likely put water at risk, those with coal ash ponds located in flood zones may pose an elevated threat, as being in a flood zone indicates both proximity to water and risk of flooding,” the report reads, adding that fourteen plants located in flood zones is likely a conservative estimate.

A large number of these coal plants sit along the Ohio River, which provides drinking water to more than 3 million people.

Evidence suggests that as climate change continues, a warmer atmosphere will be able to hold more moisture, resulting in more frequent extreme precipitation events. As heavy downpours increase, it’s possible that coal ash ponds that otherwise would have only been at risk of flooding every 100 years will be at more frequent risk of flooding.

If a coal ash pond were to be hit by flooding, it’s possible that the toxic waste could then flow into nearby streams or rivers, contaminating surface water near the spill.

In 2016, Hurricane Matthew dumped 18 inches of rain in parts of North Carolina, causing rivers across the state to rise to dangerously high levels. Environmental groups were concerned that the flooding could breach some coal ash ponds operated by Duke Energy. The utility initially said that it did not expect the flooding to breach the ponds, but later admitted that “an unknown amount of coal ash” had in fact been discharged during the flooding at one of its coal-fired power plants.

The report released this week calls for a moratorium on new or expanded coal ash ponds, and calls for old coal ash ponds to be excavated and lined in order to keep the waste from seeping into groundwater.

Under the Trump administration’s proposal to rollback Obama-era rules on coal ash, however, utilities would be able to decide if and when they tested for groundwater contamination, rather than requiring all utilities to adhere to a mandated schedule as the Obama-era regulations would have required. The rollback would also give a large amount of autonomy to states in crafting their own requirements for coal ash disposal and cleanup.

“The existing EPA policies on coal ash don’t even classify it as ‘hazardous waste.’ Now, the EPA is trying to weaken coal ash policies even more,” Rumpler said. “That’s just inviting disaster for our rivers.”

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