Coal-fired power may get reprieve
Saturday, April 14, 2007 12:41 AM PDT
By Don Jenkins
Printable version
E-mail this articleOLYMPIA -- The Senate and Gov. Chris Gregoire likely will agree with changes the House made to climate-change legislation, which won't bar coal plants from Washington but may make them a riskier undertaking for investors, electric utilities and ratepayers.
"I'm very pleased with the result," the bill's prime sponsor, Sen. Craig Pridemore, D-Vancouver, said Friday. "I fully expect us to concur."
The House late Thursday approved Senate Bill 6001 by an 84-14 vote. The bill sets goals for reducing the state's contribution to global climate change and also requires new power plants to meet low-carbon standards.
Gregoire is expected to sign the bill, said her spokeswoman, Holly Armstrong.
The legislation is a compromise between a Senate-approved bill that may have blocked a coal gasification plant at the Port of Kalama and a House energy committee proposal that Pridemore said gave too much leeway to new fossil-fuel power plants.
"I think what we've accomplished is what we were striving to accomplish all along," Pridemore said.
The original Senate bill would have forced Energy Northwest to bet that it could control carbon emissions from its proposed Kalama coal gasification plant by storing them permanently underground. Energy Northwest said technology still is being developed, and the uncertainty would scare investors away from the $1.5 billion project, which it hopes to open in 2012.
The compromise bill would require coal plants to try to develop the carbon-storing technology. Failing that, plant operators could compensate by buying and closing older power plants that emit more carbon dioxide, a so-called "greenhouse" gas that traps heat in the atmosphere.
"Obviously, it's a costly proposition to do that," Energy Northwest spokesman Brad Peck said. "It remains to be seen whether investors are willing to accept that risk."
Peck said the compromise bill is better for Energy Northwest than the legislation that passed the Senate earlier, but he added that "it may be enough to proceed, or it may not be."
"It's not an obvious showstopper. It opens the door, but how much the door has been opened, it's too early to say," he said.
Energy Northwest is a consortium of 20 public utilities, including Cowlitz PUD. It says the Kalama plant would be a reliable source of reasonably priced power that won't be dependent on the wind or river flows to generate electricity.
A state panel is reviewing the project and will recommend to Gregoire whether she should OK it.
"In effect, the Legislature has raised the cost of power that would come from the facility," Peck said. "Ultimately, it's the ratepayers who have to absorb any of these increased costs."
The spokesman for advocates of renewable energy, and who oppose the Kalama plant, said the group got most of what it sought in the climate-change bill.
"It's not the whole loaf, but we believe this bill is quite improved from what it was earlier in the House," said Marc Krasnowsky of the NW Energy Coalition. "We think the compromise on (the Kalama plant) at worst promises no net gain in emissions."
House energy committee chairman Jeff Morris, D-Mount Vernon, said Washington's hydro-based power system already is one of the cleanest in the country. "But that doesn't mean we can't do better," he said.
The measure received bipartisan support, though Rep. Mike Armstrong, R-Wenatchee, invited lawmakers to visit Wenatchee in the winter if they're worried about global warming. "I think this whole issue is still too fresh and too young for us to make determinations on," Armstrong said. "I just don't think there is truly an issue there yet."
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