By Steve Tuttle

In the engineering equivalent of trying to teach an old dog new tricks, state and federal clean-air rules are forcing 14 coal-fired power plants in North Carolina — the muscular, aging backbone of the state's electric grid built decades ago when pollution-control technology was in its infancy — to emit, relatively speaking, hardly a puff of smoke.

If all goes as planned — and at this point that's a big if — the 14 plants will emit 69 percent less nitrogen oxide in five years than they do now and the air we breathe will be noticeably clearer. Nitrogen oxide, a byproduct of combustion, reacts with hydrocarbons in the air — particularly on hot, muggy summer days when there's little wind — to form ozone. Officials say about half of all the ozone in the state can be traced to emissions from the 14 plants.

Ozone is North Carolina's most widespread air-quality problem, according to Alan Klimek, director of the Air Quality Division of the state Department of Environment and Natural Resources. It is unhealthy to breathe, particularly for children and people with asthma and other respiratory problems. It also can damage trees and crops. After declining markedly in the 1980s, ozone came storming back over North Carolina during the 1990s, largely because the state's rapid population growth meant a million more people were driving cars and using more electricity, Klimek said.

North Carolina, which has long prided itself on having air so clean that the sky overhead was a perpetual Carolina blue, recorded a shocking 70 ozone-alert days in 1998 and 68 in 1999, fifth-highest among the 50 states. In 1999, more than half the state's population suffered through at least one ozone-alert day.

Determined to reverse this worrisome trend toward decreased air quality, the state has focused its strategy on curbing emissions from the coal-fired power plants, seven of which are owned by Raleigh-based CP&L and seven by Charlotte-based Duke Power.

Reacting to public demand for cleaner air and to pressure from the EPA, the state Environmental Management Commission last October adopted rules requiring the coal-fired power plants to clean up their act. The EMC, the state's chief environmental regulator, says CP&L and Duke Power must reduce the amount of nitrogen oxide coming from their coal-fired plants from a collective 89,000 tons a year now to 37,294 tons in 2004 and then to 28,100 tons in 2006.

Such reductions will be particularly noticeable at two of the plants — at CP&L's Roxboro facility in Person County north of Durham, which is the nation's 10-largest emitter of nitrogen oxide, and at Duke's Belews Creek facility near Winston-Salem, the nation's third-largest source of the pollutant. The EMC's new regulations also mandate reductions in nitrogen oxide emissions from large industrial boilers, electric co-generation plants and petroleum pipeline compressor stations.

Although environmental groups say the EMC's rules don't go far enough, most observers applauded the regulatory process and the result. The rules adopted by the EMC largely reflect a compromise hammered out by Gov. Jim Hunt that straddled demands by environmentalists and what the utilities believed sound science supported and their shareholders could stand. In the end there were no public protests and no lawsuits.

CP&L and Duke Power are now moving ahead with plans to install state-of-the-art pollution-control equipment at the plants known as Selective Catalytic Reduction systems, or SCRs. They are highly effective and dearly expensive, costing $50 million a pop. CP&L is well along on a major upgrade at its Roxboro plant, where utility spokesman Mike Hughes says the first of five SCRs to be installed there will be operational by June.

Both CP&L and Duke Power already were in the process of making smaller reductions of emissions from their coal-fired generating plants. To comply with federal regulations aimed at reducing acid rain, Duke Power over the past two years has invested $50 million in equipment that cut emissions from its plants by 40 percent. CP&L has spent $140 million modernizing five of its plants in a move that cut its nitrogen oxide emissions by 50 percent.

The utilities are willing to spend that kind of money to keep the aging plants in operation because they're paid for, they're very reliable and relatively cheap to operate. Coal always has been and still is the cheapest source of fuel for generating electricity. The 14 coal-burning plants produce 60 percent of all the electricity consumed in the state and they are a main reason that electric rates are as low as they are here, compared to other states.

But even as Duke Power and CP&L begin the five-year process of complying with the new state rules, officials at the two utilities and others in the electric industry are raising some important concerns.

Their biggest problem is purely technical: How quickly can they solve the difficult engineering challenge of installing SCRs at plants — some of which are nearly 40 years old — that simply weren't designed to operate under such strict, tricky controls. They say it's like making the exhaust from a '68 Cadillac as clean as what comes out of a new Honda Civic without decreasing the old land yacht's pick-up or performance.

Compounding the engineering problem is the clock: The plants will largely have to be shut down for the installation of the new pollution controls. The utilities are loath to do that during the summer, when air conditioners are humming, or in the winter, when most people crank up the thermostat. So that means the work can only be done in spring and fall months when the demand for electricity is at its lowest.

“What we're nervous about,” says Duke Power official George Everett, “is that we will have to take these plants off line to make these retrofits. And Duke and CP&L will be doing this at the same time. What happens if these outages get extended beyond the off-peak times of year?”

Normally that wouldn't be amajor problem, Everett says, because Duke and CP&L could make up the difference by buying power from utilities in other states. But that's not a dependable option now, he notes, because utilities in 22 states east of the Mississippi will, to varying degrees, be going through the same process. To comply with new clean-air regulations imposed by the EPA, utilities in all those states will be idling their old coal-fired power plants at various times to install equipment to reduce nitrogen oxide emissions.

“Usually we'd be able to help each other out. But this time we're all in the same boat,” Everett says.

The states involved are Alabama, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Virginia, Wisconsin and West Virginia.

Several officials contacted for this story say it will be critical not only for Duke Power and CP&L to coordinate when they idle their plants in North Carolina but also for the utilities across the 22 states to cooperate in how and when their coal-fired generation facilities are out of service. No one wants to repeat Cali-fornia's recent experience of brownouts and possible utility bankruptcies.

“If you remember, the whole chain of events in California began last fall when a few generation plants were taken out of service for environmental reasons,” Everett says. “That reduced supply just enough to trigger the crunch and created a big problem for folks out there.”

Moreover, CP&L and Duke Power can't just go down to Wal-Mart and buy a bunch of SCRs. There are only one or two companies capable of manufacturing the type of SCRs that the utilities need and only a handful of construction companies with crews trained in such installations available for hire.

“We will be competing in a relatively small pool for these new technologies, for purchasing them and hiring the crews to have them installed,” Hughes says.

And the inevitable is occurring when demand increases for a product in short supply, says Everett. “We already have bid one (SCR installation) and we are in the process of engineering and bidding a couple of other units. We anticipate the first actual construction by 2002. What we've learned so far is our costs are going up faster than we ever thought possible.”

It will help a lot if the state gives Duke Power and CP&L a little flexibility, officials for both companies say. “What we initially talked with the state about and continue talking about is that instead of requiring a specific technology and a target (of emissions reduction) for each specific plant, that we be given a target of so many tons to reduce (collectively for all the plants) and then give our engineers the flexibility to meet that target,” Everett says.

“I think the state understands our concerns,” Everett adds, “but whether they will do anything about it is not clear yet.”

And even as Duke Power and CP&L begin this latest upgrade of their 14 plants, another regulatory hurdle is appearing on the horizon. The EPA recently announced it was starting a new rulemaking proceeding aimed specifically at coal-fired power plants.

“We certainly support cleaner air,” Hughes says, “but it does bear mention that this involves a significant cost and the option at some point to recover these costs (from consumers). We're planning to spend between $280 and $370 million between now and 2005. That's beyond the $175 million we've already spent on clear air technology. And just this week the EPA indicated it will begin to regulate mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants and over the next three years they will develop rules as to what that standard will be. What that will cost nobody knows.”

And while everyone agrees that less nitrogen oxide in the air is good for everyone, Klimek, the state's top air-quality official, even concedes that scientists sometimes oversimplify matters by laying the whole blame on industrial sources. For reasons that aren't readily apparent, the 68 ozone-alert days in 1999 suddenly dropped to 35 in 2000 — before the first SCR was working at any of the coal-fired power plants.

Why the sharp drop? Klimek shrugs his shoulders. “There are a lot of factors you can attribute it to,” he says, “but the simplest answer is we had a real hot summer in 1999. Hot, still air is a cooker for ozone. Last summer it wasn't quite so hot.”

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