Coal debate swirls around Santee Cooper

CROSS — Thunderclouds roll across Lake Moultrie toward ink-black dunes of coal next to Santee Cooper's power plant here.

As the clouds near, everything turns shades of gray: The pale smokestacks rising higher than a 40-story building; the whiter steam billowing from the stacks; the conveyor belts feeding coal into the complex on one side; and the silver transmission lines marching away like soldiers on the other.

With its giant smokestacks and powerful generators, the Cross plant is an impressive sight inside and out. Santee Cooper has spent billions of dollars to build and improve it, and the utility's leaders say it has some of the most advanced equipment money can buy, especially when it comes to reducing pollutants.

Yet coal plants such as this one are at the center of an increasingly heated debate over global warming and mercury pollution.

Santee Cooper wants to build a new $1 billion plant in a rural area between Florence and Conway.

The plan is generating strong opposition from environmentalists and

energetic support from business groups. Santee Cooper needs a state permit to proceed, and a key public hearing is scheduled Thursday in the tiny town of Pamplico. Both sides have vowed to turn out in force.

Utilities face similar debates across the country. In Kansas, regulators last month nixed a utility's permit to build a new coal-fired plant because of its projected carbon dioxide emissions.

Mercury contamination

In recent months, power companies have scrapped at least 16 proposed plants and delayed dozens more. Federal lawmakers have proposed taxing utilities on the carbon dioxide they produce, a potential blow to Santee Cooper and other utilities that depend on coal-fired power plants.

Coal-fired power plants also pump toxic mercury into the air, which eventually ends up in fish.

In a recent series, The Post and Courier showed how some people who frequently eat mercury-contaminated fish caught at two hot spots in the coastal plain have unusually high levels of mercury in their bodies.

Opponents have latched onto the mercury issue, calling coal-fired power plants a threat to public health.

Together, the global warming and mercury issues raise questions involving billions of dollars in investment and future spending for Santee Cooper and other utilities that burn coal: Are plants like the one in Cross models of modern engineering? Or are they future white elephants?

On a recent afternoon, Bill McCall Jr., Santee Cooper's chief operating officer, eagerly showed off the Cross complex, one of the state's biggest power plants.

Santee Cooper built its first generator here in 1983, added a second one in the mid-1990s and a third this year. The fourth is scheduled to go online in 2009. The last two generators will cost $1.34 billion, twice the price of the new Cooper River bridge. At one point, more than 1,800 construction workers toiled on site.

When all four generators are spinning, Cross will crank out enough electricity to light all the homes in Charleston and Columbia combined. "We really needed that fourth generator last summer," McCall said. On one hot day, Santee Cooper had to buy electricity from another utility.

Perched on a metal walkway high in the plant, McCall explained how the plant converts coal into electricity: First a furnace burns coal to heat water and create steam. The steam then turns a generator's turbines to produce electricity. For all the power they produce, the turbines are strikingly small — slightly larger than a tractor-trailer.

Pollution-control equipment takes up roughly half of the plant's buildings and structures. "When we first started, we couldn't get 30 percent (of the pollutants) out," McCall said, pointing to the plant's original precipitators. "That one over there took out 70 percent, and over there it's 90 percent." He pointed to the newest precipitators. "Here it's 99 percent. That's the technology working."

Tucked high in the stacks are what he and other utility officials describe as the most advanced monitors for mercury emissions that money can buy. McCall and other Santee Cooper officials said they think these new monitors will show that two of Cross' generators emit just 30 pounds of mercury a year.

From this perch, the plant's scale begins to take shape. The smoke- stacks range from 480 feet to more than 600 feet tall. Bulldozers are dwarfed by the coal piles in the distance. When all four units are running in just over a year, Cross will burn roughly two 100-car trains of coal a day.

Scrapping coal plants

Crystal Cook, 20, lives an hour and a half away from the Cross plant, next to the place where Santee Cooper wants to build a new $1 billion coal-fired plant.

The site sits on the Great Pee Dee River. Cook said workers already have cleared trees. She worries that the plant will release mercury into streams already full of contaminated fish. "I know the area needs jobs, but this isn't right," she said.

She and members of six environmental groups protested last week outside the state Department of Health and Environmental Control in Florence after The Post and Courier series showed mercury hot spots near the plant's site form a "mercury triangle" where fish are so contaminated that the state warns against eating a single serving of certain species, including bass and bowfin.

The groups called on DHEC to deny Santee Cooper's permit to build the new plant and to begin testing people in the area for mercury contamination.

The protest reflects an increasingly organized movement here and across the country against coal-fired power plants.

More than a dozen states have filed lawsuits challenging the Bush administration's strategy to reduce mercury emissions. Utilities scrapped plans for at least 16 coal-fired plants in recent months and more than three dozen have been delayed because of concerns over global warming and rising construction costs, according to a U.S. Department of Energy tally of coal plants. In Texas, a major utility dropped eight of 11 of its proposed plants, focusing instead on nuclear and wind projects.

Conservation groups say that a new coal-fired plant is a bad investment. "You can't ignore the cost of carbon," said Blan Holman, a lawyer for the Southern Environmental Law Center. His group and others are preparing to take Santee Cooper to court if the utility moves forward.

'We have to suit up'

As Santee Cooper's chief executive officer, Lonnie Carter runs a utility that provides power to 2 million South Carolinians in 46 counties. "It's easy for people to take cheap shots," he said in his office in Moncks Corner recently. "But we have to suit up every day, every hour and have somebody that's producing electricity." If Santee Cooper doesn't build the Pee Dee plant by 2012, he can't guarantee all his customers will have power on peak energy days.

He added that Santee Cooper is sensitive to concerns about pollution. That's why Santee Cooper's board of directors decided two weeks ago to set a goal for the utility: In 12 years, the utility wants 40 percent of its energy from sources that don't produce greenhouse gases. Most of that would come from new nuclear plants. Today, the company gets 87 percent of its energy from coal.

He's also sensitive to people's electric bills. Some proposals to tax carbon dioxide would raise rates between 15 and 60 percent, he said. "And 60 percent isn't Chicken Little."

He's skeptical that utilities should be blamed for global warming in the first place. "In some ways it can be a little bit gaudy to think that we can actually affect the climate." America is "the Saudi Arabia of coal," he said, adding that coal plants reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources. "We can't abandon coal."

As the debate over coal heats up, four generators sit in a cavernous room in the Cross plant, their turbine blades capable of spinning 3,600 times a minute. On this day, three are running, powering lights across South Carolina, while outside the storm clouds darken and it begins to rain.

Reach Tony Bartelme at 937-5554 or tbartelme@postandcourier.com.