Agency action would cut transport of air pollutants from Pa. power plant
EPA Proposes to Grant Clean Air Act Petition to Improve Air Quality in New Jersey
WASHINGTON (March 31, 2011) – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today proposed to grant a petition submitted by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection to limit sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions from a Pennsylvania power plant that are adversely impacting air quality in four New Jersey counties. The proposed rule, when final, would require the Portland Generating Station in Northampton County, Pa. to reduce its SO2 emissions by 81 percent over a three-year period. Exposure to SO2 can aggravate asthma and cause other respiratory difficulties. People with asthma, children, and the elderly are especially vulnerable to these effects.
Under the Clean Air Act, when a facility impacts air quality in another state, the affected state can petition EPA and request that the facility be required to reduce its impact. In a September 2010 petition, New Jersey asked EPA to find that the Portland power plant is impacting the state’s air quality and to require the facility to reduce its SO2 emissions. These emission reductions can be achieved using proven and widely available pollution control methods.
New Jersey conducted several air quality modeling analyses to evaluate SO2 levels in the state. These analyses show that the level of SO2 in the air is exceeding the agency’s 1-hour national air quality standard and that the Portland plant is the main source of emissions. EPA also conducted its own modeling analyses and found the same results.
Typically a mix of sources from multiple locations is responsible for air quality issues in a specific area. However, in this case, the extensive analysis shows a clear connection between the emissions from the Portland plant alone and the elevated level of SO2 in New Jersey.
EPA will accept comment on this proposal until May 27, 2011. The agency is also holding public hearing on this proposed rule on April 27, 2011 in Oxford, N.J. The hearing will provide stakeholders with the opportunity to submit written or oral comments in person. A written record of the hearing will be compiled and submitted to the docket. Any questions posed at the hearing will be replied to in a response to comment summary issued with EPA’s final response to the petition.
More information on the petition and public hearing: http://www.epa.gov/ttn/oarpg/new.html
Contacts: Terri A. White, EPA Region 3, (215) 814-5523, white.terri-a@epa.gov
Elias Rodriguez, EPA Region 2, (212) 637-3664, Rodriguez.elias@epa.gov
Don’t turn Pennsylvania into Texas
Introducing his first budget last week, Gov. Tom Corbett proposed gutting state funding for education while sparing natural gas drillers from the type of production tax imposed by all other major gas-producing states. Corbett argued that a gas industry unencumbered by a production tax would turn Pennsylvania into “the Texas of the natural gas boom.”
Well, there already is a “Texas of the natural gas boom.”
It’s called Texas.
And despite a longstanding, but loophole-ridden, 7.5 percent production tax on the nation’s most productive gas wells, Texas, like most states, is faced with a huge budget deficit.
In fact, a recent report by the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that Texas’ projected budget gap for fiscal year 2012 is the largest in the nation when measured against its current budget, at 31.5 percent.
Unlike his fellow Republican budget-cutters in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where projected budget shortfalls stand at 16.4 and 12.8 percent respectively, Texas Gov. Rick Perry can’t blame greedy state employee unions or out-of-control social spending for his money woes.
State employees in Texas have long been barred from collective bargaining and the state is notoriously stingy when it comes to spending on schools and social programs.
A 2009 study by the National Education Association found Texas ranked near the bottom for per-capita spending for public welfare programs and per-student expenditures in public schools. Nearly one-quarter of Texans lack health coverage, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, compared to about 10 percent in Pennsylvania and 15 percent nationwide.
That still hasn’t helped Texas escape the downturn in tax revenues ravaging all states, due largely to a weakened economy that seems to just now be on the road to recovery.
In fact the very refusal by uber-conservatives like Perry – who has proposed that his state opt out of the Social Security system and maybe the Union itself – to even consider reasonable and fair tax increases over the years is what has driven Texas closer to the brink than any other state.
That’s the road Tom Corbett is proposing we follow in his proposed budget.
He would rather take money and services away from public-school students, the poor and elderly than impose a fair tax on the gas industry, which, by the way, contributed nearly $1 million to his campaign.
Corbett’s proposed budget is unfair, unconscionable and unethical.
And it is likely to land us in the same mess as Texas.
http://citizensvoice.com/news/don-t-turn-pennsylvania-into-texas-1.1117896#axzz1GJB7bAaK
March 13, 2011
Company makes diesel with sun, water, CO2
Massachusetts biotech firm promises ‘energy independence.’
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — A Massachusetts biotechnology company says it can produce the fuel that runs Jaguars and jet engines using the same ingredients that make grass grow.
Joule Unlimited has invented a genetically engineered organism that it says simply secretes diesel fuel or ethanol wherever it finds sunlight, water and carbon dioxide.
The Cambridge, Mass.-based company says it can manipulate the organism to produce the renewable fuels on demand at unprecedented rates, and can do it in facilities large and small at costs comparable to the cheapest fossil fuels.
What can it mean? No less than “energy independence,” Joule’s web site tells the world, even if the world’s not quite convinced.
“We make some lofty claims, all of which we believe, all which we’ve validated, all of which we’ve shown to investors,” said Joule chief executive Bill Sims.
“If we’re half right, this revolutionizes the world’s largest industry, which is the oil and gas industry,” he said. “And if we’re right, there’s no reason why this technology can’t change the world.”
The doing, though, isn’t quite done, and there’s skepticism Joule can live up to its promises.
National Renewable Energy Laboratory scientist Philip Pienkos said Joule’s technology is exciting but unproven, and their claims of efficiency are undercut by difficulties they could have just collecting the fuel their organism is producing.
Timothy Donohue, director of the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says Joule must demonstrate its technology on a broad scale.
Perhaps it can work, but “the four letter word that’s the biggest stumbling block is whether it ‘will’ work,” Donohue said. “There are really good ideas that fail during scale up.”
Sims said he knows “there’s always skeptics for breakthrough technologies.”
“And they can ride home on their horse and use their abacus to calculate their checkbook balance,” he said.
Joule was founded in 2007. In the last year, it’s roughly doubled its employees to 70, closed a $30 million second round of private funding in April and added John Podesta, former White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton, to its board of directors.
Work to create fuel from solar energy has been done for decades, such as by making ethanol from corn or extracting fuel from algae. But Joule says they’ve eliminated the middleman that’s makes producing biofuels on a large scale so costly.
That middleman is the “biomass,” such as the untold tons of corn or algae that must be grown, harvested and destroyed to extract a fuel that still must be treated and refined to be used. Joule says its organisms secrete a completed product, already identical to ethanol and the components of diesel fuel, then live on to keep producing it at remarkable rates.
Joule claims, for instance, that its cyanobacterium can produce 15,000 gallons of diesel full per acre annually, over four times more than the most efficient algal process for making fuel. And they say they can do it at $30 a barrel.
JAY LINDSAY Associated Press
February 28, 2011- Link
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For more information, please go to CCGG’s About Page or contact us.
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Hope remains for future of coal-to-liquid fuels project
Questions about the financing and a murky national energy policy are clouding the future of a proposed $1 billion coal-to-liquid fuels project.
Yet John W. Rich Jr. remains optimistic his plan can help break the nation’s dependence on foreign oil.
“There’s not any threat of a war over coal, but there sure is a threat of war over oil,” Rich said in an interview Thursday. “We’re continuing to pursue this whole effort. We’ve been at it for a long time. We certainly got tripped up at the federal level. … This is where the future is – making liquid transportation fuels.”
The project – planned for Mahanoy Township – has been in development for two decades. For much of that time, Rich had been counting on $100 million from the U.S. Department of Energy to help fund the project, which would convert waste coal to usable diesel fuel.
However, the federal government pulled that money from the project without explanation during the last days of the Bush administration. Read more
U.S. House Battles Over U.S. EPA Greenhouse Gas Regulations
WASHINGTON, DC, February 9, 2011 (ENS) – The Republicans and Democrats massed their forces today in the House of Representatives in a fight over the ability of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to regulate the emission of greenhouse gases.
A different House from the Democratic-led body that passed a carbon dioxide cap-and-trade bill in June 2009, this Republican-led body is considering a bill that would prevent the U.S. EPA from regulating the emission of greenhouse gases from stationary sources such as power plants and refineries.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee today held its first hearings on the draft discussion bill from the new chairman, Republican Congressman Fred Upton of Michigan.
The bill, the Energy Tax Prevention Act, states its purpose as: “To amend the Clean Air Act to prohibit the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency from promulgating any regulation concerning, taking action relating to, or taking into consideration the emission of a greenhouse gas due to concerns regarding possible climate change, and for other purposes.”
Upton said today that his bill is designed to “to protect jobs and preserve the intent of the Clean Air Act.”
The bill would overturn the EPA’s December 2009 finding that the emission of greenhouse gases endanger the public health and welfare.
Along with a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that greenhouse gases are pollutants and the EPA has the duty to regulate them, this endangerment determination is the basis for EPA regulation of greenhouse gases.
Far from being an invention of the Obama administration’s EPA, the Bush-era EPA administrator also supported a positive greenhouse gas endangerment finding.
The committee’s top Democrat, Congressman Henry Waxman of California, Tuesday released a private letter that former EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson wrote to President George W. Bush on January 31, 2008.
“It addresses the same issue as your legislation: whether carbon emissions endanger the public,” Waxman wrote Friday in his own letter to Upton, in which he shares the contents of Johnson’s private letter to President Bush.
“Administrator Johnson wrote: ‘the latest science of climate change requires the Agency to propose a positive endangerment finding, as was agreed to at the Cabinet-level meeting in November.'”
“The latest climate change science does not permit a negative finding, nor does it permit a credible finding that we need to wait for more research,” Johnson wrote.
“Administrator Johnson also wrote: ‘A robust interagency policy process involving principal meetings over the past eight months has enabled me to formulate a plan that is prudent and cautious yet forward thinking. … [I]t … creates a framework for responsible, cost-effective and practical actions.'”
“He added that actions to reduce carbon emissions ‘should spur both private sector investment in developing new, cost-effective technologies and private sector deployment of these technologies at a large scale.'”
Administrator Johnson released an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking in July 2008, which solicited public comment on an endangerment finding. The final endangerment finding was made by the Obama admininstration’s EPA head Lisa Jackson in December 2009.
Jackson testified today before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Chairman Upton’s draft bill to eliminate portions of the Clean Air Act.
“The bill appears to be part of a broader effort in this Congress to delay, weaken, or eliminate Clean Air Act protections of the American public,” Jackson said. “I respectfully ask the members of this Committee to keep in mind that EPA’s implementation of the Clean Air Act saves millions of American children and adults from the debilitating and expensive illnesses that occur when smokestacks and tailpipes release unrestricted amounts of harmful pollution into the air we breathe.”
“Last year alone, EPA’s implementation of the Clean Air Act saved more than 160,000 American lives; avoided more than 100,000 hospital visits; prevented millions of cases of respiratory illness, including bronchitis and asthma; enhanced American productivity by preventing millions of lost workdays; and kept American kids healthy and in school,” Jackson told the committee.
Jackson emphasized that the Clean Air Act itself creates jobs, particularly in the growing U.S. environmental technologies industry. “In 2008, that industry generated nearly 300 billion dollars in revenues and 44 billion dollars in exports,” she said.
“Yesterday,” said Jackson, “the University of Massachusetts and Ceres released an analysis finding that two of the updated Clean Air Act standards EPA is preparing to establish for mercury, soot, smog, and other harmful air pollutants from power plants will create nearly 1.5 million jobs over the next five years.”
Chairman Upton said his bill, “allows states to continue setting climate policy as they please, but prevents those actions from being imposed or enforced nationally.”
The bill leaves in place the tailpipe standards for cars and light trucks from model years 2012 through 2016, and allows National Highway Transportation Safety Administration to continue to regulate fuel economy after 2016.
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/feb2011/2011-02-09-01.html
EPA Gets Tough with Polluters
http://www.emagazine.com/view/?5457
EPA Gets Tough with Polluters
January 4, 2011
By Brita Belli
This week, the U.S Environmental Protection Agency‘s greenhouse gas regulations will begin taking effect—and big polluters aren‘t happy. These regulations, in keeping with the Clean Air Act, aim to require major polluters—particularly fossil fuel power plants and oil refineries—to get permits for emitting greenhouse gases. It would also compel these major emitters to seek out cleaner technologies to make reductions. These reductions will happen on a case-by-case basis, instead of under a one-size-fits-all rule. And that has coal plant operators and other fossil fuel representatives upset. “It slows everybody down because nobody knows what the rules are going to be,” Jeffrey Holmstead, who headed EPA‘s air pollution office under President Bush, told National Public Radio.
The fight has grown particularly fierce in Texas where Republican Gov. Rick Perry has accused the Obama administration of interfering with state‘s rights. The state has refused to abide by the EPA‘s emissions regulations. So this January, the EPA has sidestepped state officials, issuing greenhouse gas permits directly to Texas industries. Texas is one of a dozen states that have filed lawsuits to challenge the greenhouse gas regulations—others are Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Oregon and Wyoming—but it‘s the only state to not even attempt to comply in the meantime. According to one article in the Shreveport Times: “About 200 Texas facilities continue to operate with air and water permits that are either out of date or have been disapproved by the EPA. The agency believes they are releasing a variety of metals and chemicals into the air and water that would, under the new regulations, no longer be permitted.” Flexible permits in Texas allow industries to release toxins and volatile organic compounds at double the rate of national standards.
For environmental groups, a tougher EPA is a welcome change. Attorney Cale Jaffe from the Southern Environmental Law Center told NPR: “Finally we‘ve got the rules that are beginning to require power companies to account for their global warming pollution. That‘s a historic turn of events.” And the regulations that took effect on January 2nd apply to new permits and expansions for power plants. The EPA announced in late December that it‘s planning to set standards for carbon dioxide emissions and pollution for all power plants and refineries this year, a fight that will bring more heated battles from incoming Congress members representing coal-mining states.
SOURCES:
National Public Radio [ http://www.npr.org/2011/01/03/132612887/epa-to-enforce-new-emission-rules-on-power-plants ]
Reuters [ http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6BM2LZ20101223 ]
Shreveport Times [ http://www.shreveporttimes.com/article/20110102/NEWS05/101020340/Texas-EPA-fight-over-regulations-grows-fierce ]
Farmers, pecan growers say coal plant kills plants
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_VEGETATIVE_WASTELAND?SITE=PALEH&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2010-12-28-06-48-37
Farmers, pecan growers say coal plant kills plants
By RAMIT PLUSHNICK-MASTI
Associated Press
BASTROP, Texas (AP) — Along a stretch of Highway 21, in Texas’ pastoral Hill Country, is a vegetative wasteland. Trees are barren, or covered in gray, dying foliage and peeling bark. Fallen, dead limbs litter the ground where pecan growers and ranchers have watched trees die slow, agonizing deaths.
Visible above the horizon is what many plant specialists, environmentalists and scientists believe to be the culprit: the Fayette Power Project – a coal-fired power plant for nearly 30 years has operated mostly without equipment designed to decrease emissions of sulfur dioxide, a component of acid rain.
The plant’s operator and the state’s environmental regulator deny sulfur dioxide pollution is to blame for the swaths of plant devastation across Central Texas. But evidence collected from the Appalachian Mountains to New Mexico indicates sulfur dioxide pollution kills vegetation, especially pecan trees. Pecan growers in Albany, Ga., have received millions of dollars in an out-of-court settlement with a power plant whose sulfur dioxide emissions harmed their orchards.
Now, extensive tree deaths are being reported elsewhere in Texas, home to 19 coal-fired power plants – more than any other state. Four more are in planning stages. In each area where the phenomenon is reported, a coal-fired power plant operates nearby.
The Fayette Power Project sits on a 10-square-mile site about 60 miles southeast of Austin, near where horticulturalist Jim Berry, who owns a wholsesale nursery in Grand Saline, Texas, describes a 30-mile stretch of Highway 21 as a place where “the plant community was just devastated.”
“There was an environmental catastrophe,” Berry said recently.
“It wasn’t just the pecan groves,” he said after driving through the area. “It was the entire ecosystem that was under duress.”
Pecan grower Harvey Hayek said he has watched his once-prosperous, 3,000-tree orchard in Ellinger, just south of the Fayette plant, dwindle to barely 1,000 trees. Skeletal trunks and swaths of yellowed prairie grass make up what had been a family orchard so thick the sun’s rays barely broke through the thick canopy of leaves.
“Everywhere you look, it’s just dead, dead, dead,” Hayek said.
The grove that had produced 200,000 pounds of pecans annually yielded a mere 8,000 pounds this year. Hayek said as the family’s business decreased, he watched his father-in-law, Leonard Baca, fade. Baca, 73, died after shooting himself in the head.
Retired University of Georgia plant pathologist Floyd Hendrix, who has done extensive research on sulfur dioxide damage to vegetation, said he has reviewed photographs and test results from Hayek’s grove.
“From what I’ve seen so far, there’s not any doubt in my mind that it’s SO2 injury,” Hendrix said.
Sierra Club chemist and botanist, Neil Carman also has visited the ranch. Aside from the decreased nut production, the orchard’s leaves bore telltale brown spotting associated with damage, Carman said.
The Lower Colorado River Authority, which operates the Fayette plant, argues there is no scientific link between its emissions and the dying trees, noting the region also has suffered significant droughts.
But the authority is investing nearly $500 million to install two “scrubbers” designed to decrease pollution. A third, newer boiler has a built-in scrubber. The equipment should be in place by early 2011 and will decrease the plant’s sulfur dioxide emissions by about 90 percent, said authority spokeswoman Clara Tuma.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality says air monitors indicate the Fayette plant “is not the likely cause” of the area’s vegetative die-off. The plant operates under a state permitting program that was disapproved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in June. The EPA argues Texas’ permits do not allow for accurate air monitoring and violate the federal Clean Air Act. Texas has challenged the disapproval in court.
The EPA’s criminal investigation branch, meanwhile, has toured properties and interviewed pecan growers near Ellinger. The agency’s civil division has been asked to review the information, according to e-mails obtained by The Associated Press. Other e-mails indicate the U.S. Department of Justice’s environmental wing also investigated the matter, though a spokesman said he could not “confirm or deny” an ongoing probe.
The Fayette plant is far from a lone source of concern. From Franklin – a town about 100 miles north that is surrounded by coal-fired facilities – to Victoria – 80 miles to the south and near the Coleto Creek power plant – Texas ranchers say orchards and trees of all varieties are dying.
Charlie Faupel said his Victoria pecan trees are native plants that have grown along a creek bed for seven generations, supplementing a family income that also relied on cattle, real estate and publishing. When Faupel was a teenager, he would collect and sack the pecans, using the extra money to buy a car or go out.
Now, the few pecans that grow are bitter or thin.
On Dec. 9, Faupel filed a formal air pollution complaint against the Coleto Creek plant and demanded the state environmental commission investigate the emissions.
“I have noticed for over 20 years how the Coleto Creek power plant’s sulfur dioxide has been damaging hundreds of the trees on our property – live oaks, white oaks and pecans,” Faupel wrote. “Most of the white oak trees are already dead. The surviving trees don’t have as much foliage and they’re becoming more diseased, I believe, from the plant’s sulfur dioxide weakening the trees over time.”
The Coleto Creek Power Plant did not respond to repeated requests for comment. .
Faupel said some tree canopies recently appeared to be thickening and believes it’s because Coleto Creek put a “bagging system” on its boilers, decreasing emissions. But the plant plans to add a second boiler that is expected to add some 1,700 tons of sulfur dioxide pollution to the air annually.
“I’m not one of these fanatic environmentalists,” Faupel said. “But when you are a seventh generation rancher, you are taught to be a good steward of the land . and you want the things on it, the cattle and the vegetation, to be healthy. And they’re not.”
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States Pursue Radon Limits in Drinking Water as EPA Action Lags
http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2010/12/07/07greenwire-states-pursue-radon-limits-in-drinking-water-a-78542.html
States Pursue Radon Limits in Drinking Water as EPA Action Lags
By GAYATHRI VAIDYANATHAN of Greenwire
Published: December 7, 2010
States are taking the lead with studying levels of radon in drinking water and air even as federal regulators lag, as a coincidence of geology and population density leaves some more at risk than others of suffering from the naturally occurring radioactive toxin.
Nine states have guidelines for radon in drinking water, with New Jersey considering the most stringent levels, fourfold tighter than a limit proposed but never mandated by U.S. EPA in 1999.
Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, Massachusetts and Wisconsin are the other states that have some guidance levels for the chemical, said Ted Campbell, a hydrogeologist with the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources, and chairman of a committee tasked with recommending its own levels.
But most of the recommendations are at levels scientists say are insufficient to protect human health. Read more
U.S. Offshore Wind Potential Four Times Total Power Generated
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/sep2010/2010-09-14-091.html
U.S. Offshore Wind Potential Four Times Total Power Generated
GOLDEN, Colorado, September 14, 2010 (ENS) – The potential of offshore wind power in the United States to generate electricity is at least four times as great as the nation’s total electric generating capacity from all sources in 2008, finds a new assessment by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
In their technical report, Marc Schwartz, Donna Heimiller, Steve Haymes, and Walt Musial state, “Offshore wind resources have the potential to be a significant domestic renewable energy source for coastal electricity loads.”
Issued Friday, the NREL report presents the first draft of a national validated offshore wind resource database needed to understand the magnitude of the U.S. wind resource and to plan the distribution and development of future offshore wind power facilities. No offshore wind farms currently exist in the United States.
Wind availability and distribution is characterized by level of annual average wind speed, water depth, distance from shore, and state administrative areas.
The estimate does not describe actual planned offshore wind development, and the report does not consider that some offshore areas may be excluded from energy development on the basis of environmental, human use, or technical considerations.
The “Assessment of Offshore Wind Energy Resources for the United States” shows that 4,150 gigawatts of potential maximum wind turbine capacity from offshore wind resources are available in the United States.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, in 2008 the nation’s total electric generating capacity from all sources was 1,010 gigawatts.
The NREL report’s estimate is based on the latest high-resolution maps predicting annual average wind speeds, and shows the gross energy potential of offshore wind resources.
The potential electric generating capacity was calculated from the total offshore area within 50 nautical miles of shore, in areas where average annual wind speeds are at least 16 miles per hour at a height of 295 feet.
The research team assumed that five megawatts of wind turbines could be placed in every square kilometer of water that met these wind characteristics.
Detailed resource maps and tables for the offshore wind resources of 26 coastal states’ bordering the oceans and the Great Lakes break down the wind energy potential by wind speed, water depth, and distance from shore.
The offshore transformer station at the Lillgrund wind farm in the Oresund Sound between Malmo and Copenhagen converts the electricity produced by 48 turbines for use by 60,000 households supplied by the Swedish national grid. (Photo courtesy Siemens)
In May 2008, the U.S. Department of Energy released a report detailing a deployment scenario by which the United States could achieve 20 percent of its electric energy supply from wind energy.
Under this scenario, offshore wind was an essential contributor, providing 54 gigawatts of installed electric capacity to the grid.
“When President Obama took office in January 2009, his message clearly reinforced this challenge in a broader context of energy independence, environmental stewardship, and a strengthened economy based on clean renewable energy sources,” the authors state.
But many technical and economic challenges remain to be overcome to achieve the deployment levels described in the 20 percent wind report, the authors acknowledge.
“Many coastal areas in the United States have large electricity demand but have limited access to a high-quality land-based wind resource, and these areas are typically limited in their access to interstate grid transmission,” they say.
The new database will be periodically revised to reflect better wind resource estimates and to include updated information from other datasets. It is intended to serve as the foundation for future modifications that may include specific exclusion areas for the calculation of the nation’s offshore wind resource potential.
Offshore wind projects totaling more than 5,000 megawatts have been proposed and are in the planning or development stages in the United States and interest in offshore wind power development is growing among governments and also in the private sector.
On July 14, the American Wind Energy Association, AWEA, the national wind industry association, announced the formation of the Offshore Wind Development Coalition, called OffshoreWindDC. The new coalition will focus on advocacy and education efforts to promote offshore wind energy.
Founding members and contributors to the Offshore Wind Development Coalition include the corporations Apex Wind, Cape Wind, Deepwater Wind, Fishermen’s Energy, NRG Bluewater Wind, OffshoreMW, and Seawind Renewable.
Jim Lanard, president of OffshoreWindDC, said, “We are delighted to join with AWEA to advocate for policies that will support the development of this well-established technology. Our joint efforts will lead to job creation, significant economic development opportunities and environmental and energy security for our country.”
“The creation of this coalition demonstrates the growing interest in offshore wind energy in the U.S.,” said AWEA CEO Denise Bode. “Offshore wind provides a great opportunity to increase the use of renewable energy, thanks to the strong and steady winds that blow off our shores and proximity to electricity demand centers, particularly along the Eastern Seaboard and in the Great Lakes.”
The new coalition will join AWEA in working to secure long-term tax policy for offshore wind and shorten the permitting timeline for projects.
The effort will involve AWEA, offshore wind developers, and other stakeholders in states such as Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Michigan, Illinois and Ohio.
Bode said, “Offshore wind energy is proven in Europe, and will soon be hard at work here in America, powering our economy, protecting our environment, and creating jobs.”
In June, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and the governors of 10 East Coast states signed a Memorandum of Understanding that formally establishes an Atlantic Offshore Wind Energy Consortium to promote the efficient, orderly, and responsible development of wind resources on the Outer Continental Shelf.
On April 21, the federal government approved Cape Wind, a 130-turbine wind power project in Nantucket Sound off the Massachusetts coast that is the nation’s first approved offshore wind development.
A public-private partnership in New York State is developing a 350-megawatt offshore wind project. The Long Island – New York City Offshore Wind Project would be located about 13 nautical miles off the Rockaway Peninsula in the New York City borough of Queens.
The New York Power Authority now is reviewing five proposals from wind developers to build offshore wind turbines in lakes Ontario or Erie. Lawmakers in some lakeside counties have expressed opposition.
In addition, NRG Bluewater Wind has proposed wind power projects off the coasts of Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey; and Deepwater Wind is involved with projects off the coasts of Rhode Island and New Jersey.
On August 19, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie signed into law the most comprehensive legislation yet passed by a state to support the development of offshore wind energy. The Offshore Wind Economic Development Act directs the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities to develop and establish an offshore wind renewable energy certificate program that requires a percentage of electricity sold in the state to be from offshore wind energy.
There have been some setbacks. On August 20, Duke Energy announced the cancellation of plans to develop a three-turbine offshore wind demonstration project in a lagoon in North Carolina’s Pamlico Sound. Duke blamed high costs and greater than expected environmental impacts.
Nevertheless, the U.S. Department of Energy estimates that of the 300,000 MW of wind power that could generate 20 percent of U.S. electricity in 20 years, 50,000 MW would likely be offshore.
N.J., Pa. weigh how much to regulate deadly radon
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/local/nj/20100809_N_J___Pa__weigh_how_much_to_regulate_deadly_radon.html
Posted on Mon, Aug. 9, 2010
N.J., Pa. weigh how much to regulate deadly radon
By James Osborne
Inquirer Staff Writer
When it comes to carcinogens that industrial plants dump into the water, the government generally takes a hard line on levels of public exposure.
But public health officials accept far greater risk with the naturally occurring radioactive substance radon, which enters homes from the ground and underground aquifers through basements and water pipes.
The radioactive gas, the dangers of which have been known for decades, is so prevalent in nature that getting to the standard risk level would be nearly impossible.
New Jersey and Pennsylvania are among a number of states plentiful in radon. For more than a decade, state and federal governments have held off in regulating how much of the gas should be allowed in drinking water. The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection is analyzing data as it considers its next step.
In a report last year, the scientific body charged with this task, the New Jersey Drinking Water Quality Institute, recommended that homes and schools have mandatory air tests – nearly all radon-related deaths come from lung cancer – and a maximum level for drinking water set at a point where an additional 1 in 2,000 people would develop cancer over a lifetime of exposure.
That’s 500 times the accepted risk for the standard industrial pollutant.
The DEP is reviewing the institute’s report and will conduct its own inquiry, said John Plonski, assistant commissioner for water resources. “We are taking this very seriously,” he said.
There is no time frame for when possible radon regulations would be in place, Plonski said.
Scientists estimate that more than 200,000 New Jerseyans – primarily in the northwest, but also in parts of Gloucester County – are exposed to radon levels at or greater than the prescribed level.
Over the last two decades, public water systems have at times reached levels more than 25 times the allowable radon exposure recommended to DEP, according to the institute’s data.
That’s because excess radon is found in underground aquifers, not in water drawn from rivers, where the gas escapes.
In areas where radon is known to be prevalent, some residents intentionally stand back when they turn on the faucet or shower, which sends the radioactive gas in the water into the air. But many never think about it until they’re selling their home and are requested by the buyer or mortgage company to have a radon air test performed. The tests are not required in Pennsylvania or New Jersey, according to state environmental officials.
“Most people don’t realize because it’s odorless and colorless,” said Ed Knorr, a self-employed home contamination inspector and environmental activist in Gloucester County.
“When I tell them they have a radon problem, some will turn around and look at it as being a serious concern. Others will say, ‘Oh, well, it hasn’t killed me yet.’ Until there’s a real good program put out there, most people are never going to know.”
To install filtration systems and bring New Jersey’s water-distribution systems in line will cost about $79 million over 20 years, according to the institute’s report. That doesn’t include private wells, upon which about 40 percent of the state relies.
In the macabre math of public health, that works out to $400,000 for each person whose death from breathing and drinking radon would be prevented over 70 years, according to an institute analysis.
The cost of bringing down radon in homes with private wells is likely to be high as well, with home filtration systems running between $3,000 and $5,000, Knorr said.
With New Jersey’s economy in peril, environmentalists are skeptical that Gov. Christie will move forward on radon regulation.
Since taking office in January, Christie’s administration has delayed a number of proposed environmental regulations, including a decision on perchlorate, a chemical found in fertilizer and rocket fuel that has been found in drinking water in North Jersey.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency first proposed regulating radon levels in groundwater in 1999. The outcry was intense, with water officials across the country portending massive rate increases. A decade later, the agency’s proposed rule still is not finalized, an EPA representative said.
Pennsylvania, which has elevated radon levels across most of the eastern half of the state, does not regulate radon and also is awaiting a decision by the EPA, said a representative for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.
The fact is, radon is everywhere – in the air, the water and in the ground. In many areas, just breathing will increase the cancer risk in more than one in a million people, said Judith Klotz, a public health professor at Drexel University who helped write the institute’s report.
So the question becomes: What level is acceptable at what cost?
“There is a background risk of developing lung cancer from just living on this planet,” Klotz said. “We looked at distribution of radon in the groundwater, the cost of treatment, the risks at various levels.”
A limit of one additional cancer death per 2,000 people “seemed a reasonable recommendation,” she said.
Bill Wolfe, the New Jersey director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, has been a frequent critic of the DEP since he left the agency a few years ago.
The process of weighing expense against human life is a job for the Legislature, not one the state’s scientists should undertake, Wolfe says.
“DEP is supposed to base its decision on science. If they propose a law that is to bankrupt the state, it’s not their job to decide whether that’s right or not,” he said. “If it’s going to be $12 more a month on the water bill, then let’s have the debate.”
It’s difficult to gauge how the public would react in choosing between high levels of radon in groundwater and increased water bills, said Edward Christman, an environmental health professor at Columbia University.
He has worked on groundwater issues for decades and believes public reaction to potential loss of life has less to do with quantifiable risk than the form death might take.
“The public perception of this risk is small because [radon] doesn’t smell, it doesn’t kill you right away,” he said. “Driving a car is a higher risk, for instance. But it’s a risk the general public is willing to accept without too much worry.”