Late Monday, the Republican leadership in the North Carolina state senate introduced what they bill as the first effort in the nation to shut down coal ash ponds. The bill is the first comprehensive legislation related to coal ash to be introduced since an ash spill at Duke Energy’s retired Dan River plant, and is aimed at shuttering Duke’s 33 coal ash ponds across the state. However, on further analysis, this bill leaves a lot to be desired.
The bill, introduced by state senate president Phil Berger and rules committee chairman Tom Apodaca, would set up a nine-member Coal Ash Management Commission that would help evaluate the risks posed by the ponds. Its members would be appointed by the legislature and the governor. The bill explicitly requires Duke to shutter ponds at four of its 14 operating or retired coal-fired plants, including Dan River. Ponds at other sites would be divided into three categories based on their risk to the environment by no later than August 2015. Utilities would be required to test the groundwater and surface water around these sites for contamination. Depending on the risk posed, ponds slated for closure would have to be shut down by 2019, 2024 or 2029. The highest-risk ponds would be drained of water and converted to lined landfills, while lower-risk ponds would be capped and drained of water. Utilities would be banned from building new ash ponds, and would be required to dispose of newly generated ash in lined landfills. All new ash fill sites that use 100,000 tons or more of ash would be required to have permits, liners and drainage collection systems.
Berger, whose home in Eden, a suburb of Greensboro, is a few miles from Dan River, said the measure was necessary to restore public confidence in the state’s environmental protection system. Since the Dan River spill, the state’s environmental regulators have faced allegations that they ignored past ash spills and went as far as colluding with Duke to keep the state’s largest utility from avoiding harsh penalties. In late February, for instance, The New York Times reported that a number of current and former employees of the state Department of Environment and National Resources have complained that they have faced pressure to soft-pedal those regulations that weren’t rolled back after the GOP took full control of state government in 2013.
The bill is a marked improvement from Governor Pat McCrory’s proposal for dealing with the ponds, which was introduced in April. Notably, McCrory’s proposal doesn’t impose a deadline for closing the ponds. But the senate proposal doesn’t go nearly far enough. For instance, while the bill requires utilities to pay for ash spill cleanups, it doesn’t say whether utilities or their customers would foot the bill for draining their ponds of water and shutting them down. Duke has said that it will ask the North Carolina Utilities Commission to let it pass those costs to its customers. This proposal is insulting on its face, especially considering that Duke has stonewalled on providing information about how safe these ponds are. One of those ponds, at the retired Riverbend plant near Charlotte, is only three miles upstream from Mountain Island Lake, the city’s water supply–meaning that the nation’s 16th-largest city has what amounts to a loaded gun pointed at it. By comparison, the nearest water supply to Dan River was 25 miles downstream–more than enough time to filter out the ash. Duke only turned over documents related to those ponds in March after state regulators demanded them.
According to the Southern Environmental Law Center, which is representing several groups that have sued Duke over coal ash, the bill’s standards for evaluating ponds’ risk are somewhat vague. The center also doesn’t like a provision in the bill that would actually allow Duke to include seeps from its ponds in state permits. Additionally, the new protective measures required in the bill wouldn’t apply to smaller fill sites. According to The Charlotte Observer, smaller fill sites are very common in the Charlotte area–meaning that this could be a potentially large loophole.
Sadly, given the Republican supermajorities in both houses of the legislature, there may not be too many substantive changes to this bill before it reaches McCrory’s desk. At the very least, I hope that customers aren’t forced to pay for cleaning up these ponds. The thought that Duke is arrogant enough to make that suggestion, and that the General Assembly may be willing to go along, is unacceptable.? Period.
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Darrell Lucus is a radical-lefty Jesus-lover who has been blogging for change for a decade. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook.
