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Business slow at Elrama Power Plant
Elrama Power Plant is operating at 12 percent of its capacity and with about half the employees it once had, company officials said Thursday.
“We found a way to hang in there at this point,” plant manager Benny Ethridge said at a town meeting in Elrama on what the company has done to reduce its smokestack pollution.
The coal-generated power industry across the nation is generally operating under reduced capacity, partly because of increased competition from cheaper natural gas.
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The Elrama plant has the oldest pollution scrubbers in the United States and a unit that dates to 1952.
Residents in the area have repeatedly complained about their houses, yards and vehicles being covered with black soot. The problems at Elrama even drew national attention in 2004 when Greenpeace activists erected 563 small white crosses outside the plant to represent what they claimed to be the number of premature deaths in the region from such pollution.
The plant owner, RRI Energy Inc. of Texas, consented with the state Department of Environmental Protection to reduce its emissions. The order was lifted in April because the plant has been operating well below pollution standards, said Derek Furstenwerth, director of the plant’s environmental department.
“Some of it, frankly, is the plant is running less,” Furstenwerth said.
The plant now has 55 employees and the company is “trying to compete as best as possible,” Ethridge said.
It has been operating about 24 hours a week, Furstenwerth said.
And its neighbors are still complaining about seeing black smoke in the air.
Kurt Miller of neighboring West Elizabeth said he witnessed a steady stream of black smoke emitting from the plant on a Sunday two or three weeks ago.
“It let loose a load noise,” Miller said. “Within a minute, it was putting out pretty black smoke.”
“We have done everything we can to reduce our operating costs, lower emissions and reduce efficiency,” Ethridge said.
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shut it down! : 7/17/2009
At some point, the health of the community has to take precedent under a situation of ever-diminishing benefit. Shut it down, retrofit it (creating jobs), and make it a model for clean coal technology. There is an opportunity to turn this into a national showcase, and I bet the Feds would pick up the tab.
