Published: April 03, 2009 03:42 pm      

Judge refuses to give TVA more time on clean air

JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. — A federal judge has refused to give the Tennessee Valley Authority more time to install pollution controls on a coal-fired power plant under a lawsuit brought by North Carolina.

U.S. District Judge Lacy Thornburg ruled in January that four TVA coal plants in Tennessee and Alabama were fouling North Carolina's air, and ordered TVA to accelerate a billion-dollar program to clean them up.

TVA petitioned for an extra year to install smokestack scrubbers at its John Sevier plant in Rogersville, Tenn., by 2012, and two more years for other pollution controls by 2014. Even those dates were earlier than TVA's original plans for the $300 million project.

In court papers, TVA called the accelerated timetable a "manifest injustice."

But the judge was unmoved, saying in a ruling Wednesday that North Carolina's expert witnesses were more convincing than TVA's experts in calculating how fast the job could be done.

"The court finds that after careful review ... there was no mistake made in the findings, in the remedies ordered in the injunctive relief, or in the timetable for compliance therewith," Thornburg wrote.

TVA Chairman Bill Sansom said during a TVA board meeting in Johnson City on Thursday the federal utility hasn't decided whether to appeal the entire ruling, which also affects TVA's Bull Run and Kingston plants in Tennessee and Widows Creek in Alabama.

"I think we have a responsibility. We are environmentally sensitive. We care about the environment," Sansom said. "(But) this is a fiscal problem for us. Can we fiscally do what the court tells us to do?"

TVA is dealing with budget problems on several fronts. Besides the cost of reducing emissions from these coal plants, TVA has so far spent $68.6 million on a massive coal ash spill cleanup at the Kingston plant that TVA says could ultimately cost more than $800 million.

Just finishing the John Sevier work under the judge's timetable will be difficult, added TVA director Howard Thraikill of Alabama. "I would bet it is not possible," he said.

The lawsuit filed in January 2006 by North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper argued TVA wasn't doing enough to control emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and mercury that drift east into North Carolina's mountains.

The lawsuit was brought against all 11 of TVA's coal-fired power plants, but the judge confined the ruling to the four plants closest to North Carolina. TVA already has installed a scrubber at the Bull Run plant and is in the process of building two scrubbers at the Kingston plant. The agency also is upgrading scrubbers for the two most efficient boilers at the Widows Creek plant, but doesn't know what it will do with the plant's six other boilers.

TVA is the nation's largest public utility, supplying electricity to about 8.7 million consumers in Tennessee and parts of Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina and Virginia.