Big Stone II – Stopping the Unstoppable Coal Fired Power Plant
By John DeCock in The Huffington Post
When an expansion of the Big Stone coal-fired power plant was announced, conventional wisdom said that it couldn’t be stopped. Utilities across the country forecast the need for large numbers of new plants to satisfy our insatiable demand for more and more electricity. Big Stone II, as the project became known, seemed like one of an inevitable wave of new coal-fire power plants sweeping the nation.
Mary Jo Stueve, Clean Water Action organizer in South Dakota, wasn’t buying it. Mary Jo turned on the full power of grassroots and began organizing South Dakotans around the impacts of the plant on public health in general and water in particular. The plant, which would have been near Milbank, South Dakota, was to have been built on the shores of Big Stone Lake, headwaters to the Minnesota River, near the Minnesota border.
The project was granted water permits that would have allowed allow them to draw up to draw 3.2 billion gallons annually from Big Stone Lake. This is equivalent to 2 feet from a lake that averages a depth of 8 feet. The impacts to the lake habitat, recreation and those living along the lake would have been devastating. The Minnesota River was named as the fifth most endangered river in the country in 2008, mostly due to mercury pollution and the additional water draw downs from Big Stone.
It was a bad idea. A bad idea with lots of money behind it and a permitting process that seemed to be greased for fast approval by the states and George Bush’s EPA. The plant was sited in South Dakota due to what was seen as a less rigorous regulatory standard compared to neighboring Minnesota. South Dakota came through for the proposed plant with an air permit.
But other forces were at work. Clean Water Action, joined a Sierra Club lawsuit to challenge the South Dakota air permit, keeping the fight alive. Then came a huge setback for the project. Three days after taking office, President Obama’s EPA returned the air permit to South Dakota to redo portions.
About half of the expected customers were located in Minnesota which meant the Big Stone II partners needed to build a new transmission line across western Minnesota. This gave the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission authority to review the project. According to Minnesota law, this includes an evaluation of the need for a fossil fuel power plant and an evaluation of how construction of Big Stone II would affect Minnesota consumers. A Clean Water Action and coalition of groups in Minnesota banded together to challenge the project based on air, water and public health impacts as well as the impacts on the pocket book of Minnesota customers.
The Minnesota PUC ultimately approved the transmission lines but they placed a critical stipulation on Otter Tail Power, the project lead. They ruled that cost overruns from construction costs and expected future costs of global warming pollution emissions had to be absorbed by Otter Tail Power investors rather than passed on to their customers. The Minnesota PUC saw a risky project and would not allow consumers to be stuck with the costs of a failed gamble.
Two months ago Otter Tail Power pulled out of the project. This was preceded by the withdrawal of Great River Energy last year. The remaining partners in the $1.6 billion project were left scrambling to find investors.
Montana-Dakota Utilities, Company Central Minnesota Municipal Power Agency, Heartland Consumers Power District and Missouri River Energy Services, what remained of the original group of investing utilities, announced the closure of the project on November 2, 2009.
When ordinary people and organizations across Minnesota and South Dakota vowed to fight this plant, there was a great deal of skepticism that such a fight could be successful. Many had written Big Stone II off as a done deal and not worth spending the resources to defeat. There are some important lesson in this. Every coal fired power plant must be challenged and can be stopped. Change is inevitable, and the time for new coal fired power plants has passed. An informed public is going to defeat coal plants. It takes grass roots power and a commitment for the long haul. We have plenty of both.
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November 13th, 2009 at 10:00 am
This article is obviously not in touch with reality. Reality is that without coal there would be a huge deficit in our country’s generation capability. Coal is one of the most abundant, low cost sources of fuel we have in the U.S, currently generating over 60% of our energy needs. And, technology has allowed coal to become a clean source of energy as well. Moreover, if all of the money that was spent tyring to defeat coal could instead be channeled for additional technology, coal could become one of our cleanest resoures available.
Bottom line, if someone actually beleives that renewable energy alone will take of our country’s energy needs, they are badly mis-informed. The wind doesn’t blow consistently enough and the sun doesn’t shine long enough to reliably generate energy in a cost-effective manner.
And, please be mindful that in the end the consumer is king. They will ultimately decide what price they are willing to pay for energy…including enviromental concerns. Rest assured, they will not stand by and watch their disposable income eaten by ever-increasing energy costs which is inevitable if we remove coal from the generation equation.
Reality is that we need a balanced approach to our energy needs…an approach that utilitzes all of our avialable resources in an economic, reliable and enviromentally sound manner.
November 16th, 2009 at 11:57 am
The idea coal could ever be “the cleanest resource available” is ridiculous- even if you could somehow trap all the particulate matter and carbon (which you can’t so far- ask the people of West Virginia about showers of coal dust that looks like snow) you still have to deal with the disaster that is coal mining.
It’s time for the US to transition away from dirty energies like coal and to spend our research dollars (and tax dollars) on supporting clean alternatives- in Kansas, that means wind.