Three environmental groups – the League of Conservation Voters, Mom’s Clean Air Force, and the Environment Defense Fund – sponsored the 30-second ad, which will also run in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Washington, D.C.
The ad supports proposed regulations that would require any new power plants to emit no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour. On average, existing coal plants emit more than 1,700 pounds per megawatt hour.
A group of Virginia environmentalists said it also supported the new regulations and ads.
“These rules are important safeguards for public health and the environment, as they are expected to reduce numbers of asthma attacks and premature deaths from air pollution, among countless other benefits,” said Whitney Byrd, a spokeswoman for the Wise Energy Coalition of Virginia.
While many energy companies stopped building or planning for coal plants in recent years, a proposal for a new coal-fired plant in southwest Virginia remained a divisive issue as recently as last month.
But now, the EPA’s new standards could kill the project before it begins.
The proposed plant, known as the Cypress Creek Coal Plant, would have become Virginia’s largest coal-fired plant. The Wise Energy Coalition said the current plans for the plant would not meet the new standards.
“It is unclear how the new EPA Carbon Pollution Standards will affect the status of [the Cypress Creek] proposal since they will be subject to extensive review before the new regulations will be implemented,” Byrd said in an email to The American Independent. “However, as the rule stands and from what we understand about the coal plant proposal, the plant would fail to comply with the new Carbon Pollution Standards.”
Bill Sherrod, a spokesman for the Old Dominion Energy Co-operative that proposed the plant, said the plans had been in the works for years, but that officials were aware that regulations could cause a roadblock.
“It takes a long time to plan a base-load plant so the plans go way back,” ODEC spokesman Bill Sherrod said. “When this thing was started, none of these regulations existed, but in 2010 it became apparent that new regulations were going to come out and we’ve been kind of in a holding pattern since then.”
Although zoning plans for the Surry County plant were approved in March, Sherrod said the co-op withdrew its air permit application in 2010. As a result, construction on the plant would not begin in 2012, and therefore it would not qualify for an exemption from the proposed regulations.
Sherrod said that the co-op did not yet have a plan on how to proceed in light of the regulations, but he stressed that it had a responsibility to explore all forms of power to serve its nearly 500,000 consumers
**Public comments on the EPA’s proposed carbon regulation can be made here:
http://www.epa.gov/lawsregs/getinvolved.html
Read more:
https://www.freespeech.org/text/clean-air-ads-highlight-energy-debate-va
