The Southern Highland Reader

DILLSBORO–The U.S. Court of Appeals upheld on Tuesday the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ruling that the Dillsboro Dam should be removed.

From an Asheville Citizen-Times staff report:

The court today denied Jackson County’s petition for review of FERC’s July 2007 order allowing Duke Energy to remove the historic dam.

Read more here, from Lynn Hotaling at the Sylva Herald.

Follow this link for Duke Energy power outage information.

STATEWIDE–The North Carolina Utilities Commission has approved a 7 percent rate hike for Duke Energy customers.

The hike will increase Duke’s annual revenue by $315.2 million. Duke originally sought a $488 million increase in rates, but the Commission staff had argued that a $183 million increase for Duke would be sufficient. The final amount represents a compromise.

The rate hike will be phased in, with Duke customers seeing an initial 3.27% hike next month.The balance will come in January of 2011.

The hike is controversial, in part, because Duke plans to use part of the revenue to pay for its new Cliffside Steam Station, a large, coal-driven plant west of Charlotte. Cliffside is opposed energetically by environmentalists.

Read more here, from the Charlotte Business Journal.

SYLVA–Editorially, the Sylva Herald newspaper has been openly disdainful of the Jackson County Commissioners’ ongoing battle with Duke Energy over the fate of the century-old Dillsboro Dam.

It editorializes on the subject this week. Here’s an excerpt:

Recently we taxpayers have been asked to bear quite a burden for our county’s leaders. First they forced through revaluation right before the housing market crashed. Now we’re paying taxes based on land values that are much inflated over current market value. They then turned around and instituted a pay study by the Mercer Group that resulted in major raises for several county employees. The amount of some of those raises nearly equals the average yearly salary for Jackson County residents. Yet the taxpayers haven’t gotten a single “thank you” for footing the bill.

The editorial is available here for a short while, then afterwards at the Herald’s paid archive.

DILLSBORO–Duke Energy on Monday asked appeals court judge Zoro Guice to block Jackson County’s efforts to condemn the 96-year-old Dillsboro Dam.

Duke Energy seeks to remove the dam to mitigate other hydro electric projects in the region, as part of a settlement reached over five years ago.

Jackson County commissioners feel the county was shortchanged in the settlement, and want to keep the dam and build a park nearby.

Read more from Jon Ostendorf at the Asheville Citizen-Times.

RALEIGH–Avram Friedman, Sylva resident and Executive Director of the clean air activist organization the Canary Coalition was one of six protestors arrested last weekend at the North Carolina governor’s mansion in Raleigh.

Here’s a brief piece from the Raleigh News and Observer.

Below is an essay from Friedman titled “Why I chose to be arrested”:

On Saturday, October 24 there were thousands of demonstrations around the world, in more than 130 nations, millions of people, gathering to focus attention on the climate catastrophe unfolding in our lifetimes. About two hundred years ago, prior to the industrial revolution, the earth’s atmosphere contained roughly 270 parts per million of carbon dioxide. The worldwide scientific community has reached virtual consensus that to avoid major disruption to life-support systems there needs to be a sustained level of less than 350 parts per million of C02. But, today, due largely to the burning of fossil fuels in industrial processes and transportation, the level of C02 has risen to 390. If we don’t act quickly to change our methods and our habits, we are risking the viability of life as we know it on this earth.

In North Carolina, we have a special mission because this state is the home of Duke Energy, one of the largest producers of greenhouse gases in the world. And while more than 100 new coal-burning power plants have been canceled over the past three years in the United States of America, due to climate, pollution and economic concerns, Duke Energy is going full-steam ahead with construction of its mammoth 800 megawatt Unit 6 at Cliffside, in Rutherford County, about 50 miles west of Charlotte.

We have to be working on a plan to phase out all 14 existing utility-owned coal-burning power plants in North Carolina in the next decade or less, along with all coal plants everywhere. But, to begin construction on a new coal plant at this late hour is a form of extreme psychological denial.

Flying in the face of logic and reason, almost like a spiteful and willful child, Jim Rogers and Duke Energy continue construction at Cliffside. Construction at Cliffside continues even though energy consumption in North Carolina is declining and will continue to decline into the foreseeable future due to advancements in energy efficiency and due to conservation efforts.

Even though the latest report by the U.S. Geological Survey reveals that national retrievable coal reserves are diminishing rapidly and the cost of coal will inevitably soon rise beyond practical economical thresholds, construction at Cliffside continues.

Despite the fact that North Carolina has vast wind energy resources and the cost of building large-scale wind projects is lower per megawatt than building coal plants, with far fewer health, environmental and economic liabilities, construction at Cliffside continues.

Despite the fact that North Carolina has tremendous solar energy potential with the cost of solar technology diminishing on almost a daily basis, Duke Energy continues to feed precious financial resources into an outdated and horribly polluting technology at Cliffside.

Despite the fact that burning coal has saturated the environment with mercury, causing fetal brain damage, autism and learning disabilities in children; burning coal is causing acid rain, killing the biodiversity of our mountainous, forested and agricultural regions; burning coal is responsible for deadly high ozone levels causing asthma, emphysema, bronchitis, heart disease and early death for tens of thousands of people each year, Duke energy continues construction at Cliffside.

Despite diminishing fresh water supplies to feed a growing population in the region, Duke Energy continues to build a power plant that will use millions of gallons of water each day, and alter the temperature of water used for cooling, threatening habitat and life-support systems downstream of the plant.

Despite wind-blown coal-burning waste ash piles, failed slurry pond dams, massive and catastrophic toxic spills, despite the devastation of mountaintop removal coal mining, construction at Cliffside has relentlessly continued.

Despite federal law and court decisions regulating carbon dioxide emissions as a pollutant, and despite the fact that Cliffside Unit 6 will produce 6 million tons of CO2 each year, for the next fifty years, as much as a million cars, yet construction at Cliffside continues.

Like an undisciplined and spoiled child, used to getting whatever it wants, despite the deepest recession since the Great Depression, when people are having to make choices between paying rent, buying food or buying medicine, Duke Energy stamps its feet and demands that the Utilities Commission raise electrical rates to pay for an utterly unnecessary and wasteful power plant at Cliffside so it can sell more energy to increase its profits by expanding its area of monopoly into new territories.

One would think that given the weight of all these reasons to stop Cliffside that our public servants in the state government would rise to the occasion to protect the citizenry from this destructive, childish behavior. That’s their job, isn’t it? After all, Beverley Perdue, during her campaign to be elected Governor of North Carolina spoke out against the construction of the Cliffside power plant.

But, something happened between then and now. About three-quarters of a million dollars in campaign contributions made its way into the electoral process from the utility industry. In 2008, Beverly Purdue’s campaign alone received about $26,000 from The Duke Energy Political Action Committee and donations directly from Duke Energy executive officers. Since then, Governor Perdue has dropped her opposition to Cliffside. Business-as-usual politics, I suppose.

But, these are not business-as-usual times and we can’t allow a set of disproportionate campaign contributions destroy our children’s future. So, on October 24, 2009, about 150 demonstrators delivered a message to the Perdue Administration that she has a greater obligation than fulfilling the every wish and dream of Duke Energy. She has a responsibility to the people of North Carolina to protect public health and the environment by beginning to phase out all coal plants in this state, starting with Cliffside. She has an obligation to stand up to Duke Energy and say “This madness stops now!” She has an obligation to come out of hiding and meet with members of the environmental community to discuss steps to effectively address climate change and energy issues. She has an obligation to exercise vision and work with others to plan a future that is sustainable, replete with high-paying green technology jobs, clean air and water, renewable energy deployment, wind farms, solar roofs, economic incentives for investment in efficiency. She has an obligation to dramatically reduce North Carolina’s carbon footprint. She has an obligation to stop Cliffside. She has an obligation to represent the public interest.

The demonstration in Raleigh, on October 24, was coordinated by Greenpeace and NC WARN with support from the Canary Coalition, Clean Air Carolina, Clean Water for NC, NC Green Party, NC Fair Share, NC Progressive Democrats and Southern Energy Network.

Six people, Dick Paddock of Chapel Hill; Jean Larson of Asheville, Keval Kaur Khalsa of Durham; John Allen, a UNC-Chapel Hill student from Winston-Salem, Jim Warren of Efland and myself, Avram Friedman, of Sylva, with the support of 150 demonstrators across the street, chose to deliver this message through non-violent civil disobedience, by crossing a police line in front of the Governor’s mansion, on Blount Street, in Raleigh. For some of us it was the second arrest this year. I want to thank the Capital Police for their professional behavior in peacefully and respectfully arresting us. I guess many of them have children too.

Series: cliffside, Duke rate hikes

STATEWIDE–The Charlotte Business Journal is reporting today that Duke Energy has reached a settlement with the N.C. Utilities Commission that would significantly reduce the power-producing behemoth’s proposed rate increase.

Duke was seeking permission to raise all residential electric rates by 13.5% and all municipal street lighting rates by 16.7%.

John Downey lead for the Business Journal:

Duke Energy Carolinas has agreed too cut its $484 rate increase request “significantly” as part of a proposed settlement reached with the Public Staff of the N.C. Utilities commission.

Staff executive Director Robert Gruber and a Duke spokeswoman declined to provide details. But Gruber says the settlement “will cut it significantly.” He said that there are other features to the settlement, but that the size of the increase was important to the staff.

In fact, the staff had recommended cutting it by more than half in earlier filings to about $183.4 million. Gruber would not say if the settlement cut the increase that deeply.

Read Downey’s entire piece here.

FRANKLIN–Last week, in Franklin, the North Carolina Utilities Commission held one of several hearings concerning Duke Energy’s request to raise electric rates.

The commission must approve Duke’s request, and must take public input ahead of its decision.

The Macon News’s David Tell covered the hearing, which drew protesters and a big crowd.

Here’s an excerpt from Tell’s coverage:

They came from as far away as Asheville, Brevard and even Madison County, but it was probably the opinions of local leaders and regular folks alike whose leanings carried the most weight with other area residents.

Ultimately, it’s what sways the members of the state’s Utilities Commission that counts, as it eventually holds a final hearing in Raleigh next month and then renders a decision on the rate case, which seeks a 13.5 percent increase in rates from residential electric customers. That would be on top of a 4.5 percent hike granted in July to cover rising coal prices.

Read the whole piece here.

REGIONAL–The Macon News’s David Tell takes a look at both sides of Duke Energy’s current effort to institute rate hikes.

The rate hikes, which must be approved by the NC Utilities Commission after a series of hearings, are controversial both because they are sizable, and because critics say the money will be used to help fund construction of Duke’s Cliffside power plant, near Charlotte.

Cliffside is a coal-burning plant. Critics say that it will pollute the air and encourage mountaintop-removal mining.

A hearing on the matter is scheduled Tuesday in Franklin.

An excerpt from Tell’s story:

Last week, the Jackson-Macon Conservation Alliance and the Western North Carolina Alliance both issued releases detailing their opposition to the rate increase, which would total about 18 percent for Duke’s residential customers in North Carolina. Duke released a piece by Duke Carolinas President Brett Carter that touts the hike as paying for past and future improvements to its power system that offer environmental benefits.

Opponents of the hike continue to label it the “Cliffside rate hike,” claiming it is being asked largely to pay for the construction of a new, coalfired boiler in Cliffside, N.C., west of Charlotte. Duke Energy’s public relations effort on behalf of the hike is toiling to de-link the two issues.

Read Tell’s piece here.

STATEWIDE–The NC Utilities Commission is holding a series of public hearings throughout North Carolina on Duke Energy’s application for a rate increase to pay for continued construction on its controversial new coal-burning power plant at Cliffside and other infrastructure investments. There will be a hearing in Marion, on Thursday, September 17, 7 PM, at the McDowell County Courthouse.

Opponents of both the rate increase and the Cliffside coal plant will be holding a press conference on the lawn of the courthouse prior to the hearing, beginning at 6:15 PM. Present will be local Duke Energy ratepayers as well as representatives of the Canary Coalition, Mountain Voices Alliance, NC Interfaith Power & Light (a program of the NC Council of Churches), Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Southern Alliance for Clean Energy and Western North Carolina Alliance.

Duke Energy is seeking a 12.6% overall increase in revenues from this rate hike. But, some sectors will be hit harder than others. Residential ratepayers are being targeted for a 13.5% increase. This is on top of a 4.5% increase already granted by the Utilities Commission in August to compensate Duke for coal they purchased last year at a high price. So, residential customers would experience a total increase of 18% if the Utilities Commission grants Duke Energy’s application. Fees for municipal street lighting will rise a whopping 16.7% plus the 4.5% fuel fee, potentially driving local taxes higher to help city and county governments make ends meet.

Next Tuesday, September 22, at 7 PM, there will be another public hearing on the same matter in Franklin. Again, there will be a press conference, 6:15, prior to the hearing on the lawn in front of the Macon County Courthouse.

REGIONAL–If Duke Energy’s efforts to raise its electric rates succeed, Jackson County residents will feel a big impact.

Duke Energy has applied to the N.C. Utilities Commission for permission to raise all residential electric rates by 13.5% and all municipal street lighting rates by 16.7%. In addition, Duke will scuttle its current contract with Western Carolina University in 2010 and put in place a new 20-year agreement that includes 16% rate increases for each of the next three years.

Western Carolina sells power to 2,700 off-campus customers, and will seek to pass on the rate increase to them. The school’s board of trustees voted unanimously Friday to continue purchasing power from Duke.

Duke’s general rate increase comes on top of regular increases for higher fuel costs, and is particularly controversial because it is intended to help cover the cost of construction of the controversial Cliffside coal-fired power plant. Critics say that that plant, under construction near Charlotte, is unnecessary, will pollute, and will produce power for Duke customers outside of North Carolina.

For a household with a monthly bill of $100, the general rate increases will add $216 per year. Municipal tax rates would likely rise to cover the street lighting hike.

For WCU customers, mileage may vary – rate increases on the WCU grid will depend on decisions made at the university. A WCU press release says that the school is “still negotiating the proposed rate hike with Duke” but adds that Western has already applied to the NC Utilities Commission for the right to increase the rates it charges its off-campus customers.

REGIONAL–Duke Energy has petitioned the North Carolina Utilities Commission to allow the company to raise the rates it charges for electricity to residential and commercial customers. Residential rates would increase by about $11 per month.

Duke Energy provides electrical service to much of the southwestern mountain region.

Jennifer Daniels at the Cashiers Crossroads Chronicle had a front page piece last week on the proposed hike. Here’s an excerpt:

The increase to bills will vary depending on the type of customer. The average North Carolina residential bill – for 1,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity – would increase approximately 13.53 percent, or $11 a month. General service rates (non-residential and non-industrial customers) would increase by approximately 9.78 percent, industrial customers’ bills would go up approximately 15.25 percent and outdoor lighting rates would increase by approximately 16.74 percent.

STATEWIDE–Federal Judge Lacy Thornburg, of Webster, dismissed on Thursday an environmental lawsuit challenging Duke Energy’s construction of a $2.4 billion addition to its Cliffside coal-fired power plant.

Rather than a judgment on the validity of the suit, however, Thornburg’s ruling seems to be a technicality. Thornburg noted that both state and federal courts are being asked to rule on the same issue, and so is basically removing himself from the picture so that the state courts can rule.

The next ruling on the issue will be handed down by a state administrative court.

The lawsuit was brought by five environmental organizations, including the Canary Coalition, which is headquartered in Sylva and Asheville.

The Canary Coalition recently brought suit against the Town of Sylva regarding a rezoning action that benefitted Sylva’s Jackson Paper Manufacturing Co. That suit has yet to be resolved.

From the Charlotte Observer:

Five environmental groups filed the federal suit last year, claiming Duke illegally began work on the plant before a full review of the stringency of its pollution controls. Cliffside is 60 miles west of Charlotte.

The groups maintained that, contrary to a ruling by state regulators, Cliffside will be a major source of toxic pollutants, such as mercury, and so is required to install the most effective controls available.

Thornburg said last December that the environmental groups “might be right”. He said Thursday that the groups can sue again in Federal court if the upcoming state ruling isn’t to their liking.

Duke Energy claimed that Thornburg’s decision shows that their side of the story — that Cliffside will be plenty clean — is valid. A representative of the Southern Environmental Law Center, a party to the suit, said that Thornburg’s ruling basically puts a decision off to a later day.

SYLVA-Cullowhee’s Mark Singleton, Director of the national organization American Whitewater, has an op-ed in today’s Asheville Citizen-Times concerning the Dillsboro Dam controversy.

American Whitewater, founded in 1954, holds as its mission “to conserve and restore America’s whitewater resources and to enhance opportunities to enjoy them safely.”

Here’s an excerpt from today’s column:

Many questions remain about the viability of Jackson County’s decision. First, Duke Energy has federal pre-emption that supersedes the county’s powers. Second, it is unclear if the county can take the dam itself, or merely the land. Third, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has required that the dam be removed and this decision may be binding on whoever owns the dam. Finally, what motive does the county have to spend taxpayer dollars to condemn property that it will get at no cost under the approved Settlement Agreement? These are just a few of the remaining questions, which will almost certainly be decided in court at additional taxpayer expense.

DILLSBORO–Two months ago, the courtroom slap-fight between Jackson County and Duke Power over the fate of the Dillsboro Dam seemed to have descended nearly to the level of farce.

Duke Energy, which holds a monopoly on electricity production in this area and has many hydroelectric projects here, wants to tear down the dam as part of an enormous licensing agreement, reached years ago. Jackson County’s Commissioners long ago decided that the county didn’t get enough of a cash settlement in the agreement, and that the dam, which is more or less the centerpiece of the little town of Dillsboro, should stay.

Jackson County, with the firepower of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Duke Energy, half the environmentalists and a growing segment of the population arrayed against it, seemed to be pouring tens of thousands of dollars down a questionable hole in lean economic times.

As the court hearings droned on, local reporters tried to take accurate notes while dreaming of things they’d rather be doing — like driving bamboo shoots under their fingernails.

Then, things took an interesting turn.

After being forced in court to release the necessary permits for Duke to begin dredging silt from behind the dam, and as court-ordered mediation efforts were winding up, Jackson County quietly paid a consulting firm almost $20,000 to design a large river park and riverwalk along both banks of the Tuckaseegee above, at and below the dam location.

The commissioners now say they’ll use eminent domain to take the dam from Duke Energy. The eminent domain possibiliy has been mentioned before, but there are only certain circumstances that are grounds for eminent domain under North Carolina law. Public recreation is one of them.

The Sylva Herald newspaper editor Lynn Hotaling points out in this blog post, though, that the original agreement terms call for the land alongside the river to be turned over to the town of Dillsboro to be used for public recreation. Dillsboro has since relinquished its rights to that property to the county. The upshot is that if the county condemns the land, it’ll pay Duke fair market value, but if Duke removes the dam, the power company will give the county the land for free.

The Sylva Herald has taken an open editorial stance against the county’s legal efforts.

Meanwhile, Duke has announced that it will accelerate its efforts to remove the dam, and will accomplish as much as possible before condemnation proceedings interfere.

DILLSBORO–I find the Dillsboro Dam controversy a little boggling, and I’m not alone.

It isn’t the fundamentals of the argument between Duke Energy and supporters of keeping the dam that are hard to grasp — although Duke’s relicensing agreement is complex — but more particularly how the Dillsboro situation fits in to the much larger picture of “big” hydroelectric power versus “little” hydro, and how the two are influenced by our insatiable hunger for energy.

I admit a general mistrust of Duke. I also admit that from an environmental standpoint, I’ve long fallen into the less-dams-the-better camp, but without doing much homework on the subject. My friends who have done their homework are more-or-less split over the Dillsboro Dam issue. And therein lies the boggle.

Along comes the invaluable Orion Magazine, with an article in its May/June issue that is well-written well-researched and about time — at least for those of us who are trying to figure Dillsboro out.

A few excerpts from Ginger Strand’s piece The Poetry of Power:

Few things are as beautiful as falling water. That beauty has been making power for thousands of years—first mechanically, with waterwheels, and then electrically, with turbines and generators. Generator, from the Latin generare, to produce, is a misleading word. No device can produce energy; it must convert it from something else. The burning of coal converts millions of years’ worth of stored sunlight into heat. A hydroelectric plant converts the kinetic energy of falling water into electricity.

(snip)

There’s just something about a dam. Dave Brower fought to obstruct them. Edward Abbey dreamed of exploding them. Derrick Jensen dreams of exploding them still. John McPhee wrote that for environmentalists, the Devil’s world is ringed with moats of oil and DDT, but its absolute epicenter holds a dam. The treacherous wizard Saruman in The Lord of the Rings powers his evil orc factory with a dammed river. “Free the river!” cry the Ents: big explosion, triumph of good. Nothing says eco-warrior like killing a dam.

(snip)

John Seebach, director of American Rivers’s Hydropower Reform Initiative:

“The footprint of all these little dams adds up and chokes up a watershed,” he says. “A big plant provides a lot more power.” That extra capacity means big plants are more profitable. And more profit means they can afford to mitigate the harm they do to the river with measures like fish hatcheries and smelt barging.

He concedes that, done right, small hydro plants can preserve riparian habitat and provide for fish passage. But for John, “done right” is the hitch. Doing it right requires money, and John just isn’t sure the economics add up. As projects get smaller, their price per kilowatt-hour ramps up. Private producers and communities may like the idea of small hydro, but as costs increase, John worries they’ll be tempted to relax environmental standards. That temptation might only grow as more and more states institute renewable portfolio standards—minimum percentages of power that utilities must generate with renewables.

Cost is a highly rational way to make decisions. Big dams may not be ideal, but they’re efficient. Small dams do less harm, but their economic benefits may not outweigh the harm they do. One thing this assumes, of course, is that there’s no relationship between our centralized power grid and our profligate use of power. But it isn’t easy to connect the action of running your microwave to the burning of a hunk of coal two counties away.

(snip)

Lori Barg, principal of Community Hydro, a small hydro consulting firm:

Lori talks a lot about “distributed power”: generating power at thousands of small sites, in a variety of renewable ways, rather than at huge centralized plants. Such a system would not only favor low-impact, greener power, but it would be less “brittle,” meaning less subject to cascading failures when one big plant goes down. It would reduce transmission losses, too, because the shorter the distance power has to travel, the less is lost in the process.

“We’re losing one or two times as much power as we’re using in the end,” Lori says. “If you want to start looking at the economics, is a kilowatt-hour generated in Boston the same as a kilowatt-hour generated in Peterborough, when you have so many losses along the way? It’s like having a leaky bucket.”

Read the whole piece here.

UPDATE 4.03.09: Judge Laura Bridges ruled in favor of Duke Power in the judgment outlined below, and ordered Jackson County to issue the relevant permits. The county has appealed.

UPDATE 4.04.09: Ruling available at Sylva Herald blog here.

SYLVA–Attorneys representing Duke Energy and Jackson County met in superior court Monday, March 16, seeking a partial summary judgment in the ongoing dispute over the fate of the century-old Dillsboro Dam (map it).

Dillsboro Dam

The hearing took place before Judge Laura Bridges, who by her own admission has some studying to do about the five-year-old conflict. Judge Marlene Hyatt, who is familiar with the case, recently retired.

Monday’s hearing was centered on Jackson County’s refusal to grant permits for Duke to begin dredging sediment from behind the dam in preparation for demolition — something the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has asked it to do. Jackson County has refused to grant the permits until other facets of pending litigation are cleared up, contending that its own suits against Duke are so intertwined with the dam’s removal that they must be decided before removal can go forward. Duke argues that FERC’s ruling supersedes the rights of the county to deny permitting.

Judge Bridges heard the argument, and said that she’d rule in a week or so, as soon as she waded through the history of the case.

Read an account of Judge Bridges’ decision from Lynn Hotaling at the Sylva Herald

Read an account of earlier proceedings here, from Justin Goble at the Sylva Herald.

REGIONAL–The Canary Coalition Executive Director Avram Friedman, a Sylva resident, debated Duke Energy’s Tom Williams yesterday in Hendersonville, concerning the future of coal-produced energy.

We were surprised by the lack of media coverage, so we dropped Avram a line.

“It went well,” he wrote back. “There were about 100 people or more in attendance.”

“It was audio and video taped by Ned Doyle who does the show ‘Our Southern Community’ on WNCW radio, [and] should air later in April.

Tom Williams is a nice guy and a great PR person for Duke Energy. But, he didn’t stand a chance. It’s difficult to walk the tightrope of acknowledging the climate change crisis while you’re building a new coal-burning power plant at the same time.”

HENDERSONVILLE–Avram Friedman, of Sylva, Executive Director of the Canary Coalition, will debate Tom Williams, a Duke Energy representative, on the issues surrounding coal technology and the challenge of meeting future energy demand on March 28 in Hendersonville.

The public debate will be held at the Hendersonville Library, and is being organized by the Four Seasons Sierra Committee.

This event occurs just as groups and individuals from throughout the nation are preparing to converge on Charlotte, North Carolina, April 20, for “A Call to Conscience, the Cliffside Climate Action.”  This is planned as a large demonstration at Duke Energy headquarters organized to stop construction of the new coal-burning power plant in Rutherford County.

Plans for more than 50 new coal plants have been cancelled around the nation in the past few years due to enormous greenhouse gas production, significant increases in cost estimates, and serious political opposition.

Duke Energy’s new 800 megawatt Cliffside power plant is one of the very few coal plants moved forward, despite these factors. If completed, the Cliffside plant will emit 6 million tons of carbon dioxide each year, for the next 50 years.

STATEWIDE–State air regulators on Friday granted Duke Energy’s request to treat the new 800-megawatt Cliffside 6 power generating unit it is building west of Charlotte as a “minor source” of pollution.

The designation could allow Duke to sidestep the public process of analyzing and installing the most stringent controls to reduce hazardous pollutants such as mercury. That issue is still before the federal court, and the Division of Air Quality’s decision will allow Duke lawyers to argue that federal courts no longer have jurisdiction in the matter.

Environmentalists reacted angrily to the decision.

“Today’s permitting decision … puts the health of North Carolina citizens at risk and puts North Carolina out of step with the national trend away from coal,” said Elyse Jung, of the N.C. Sierra Club.

Avram Friedman, of Sylva, Director of the Canary Coalition, wrote this, in an open letter to Governor Perdue: “Plans for building new coal burning power plants are being abandoned throughout the rest of the country. There is no reason for you to allow Duke Energy to give North Carolina the stigma of being one of the last bastions of dirty coal.”

Duke Energy framed the decision as proof that it is becoming a more responsible corporate citizen, and that the decision was appropriate given the current economic climate.

Here’s an excerpt from a story in Saturday’s Raleigh News and Observer:

A coalition of environmental groups sued last year, challenging Duke’s construction of a major pollution source without an analysis of the maximum pollution controls needed. In December, U.S. District Judge Lacy Thornburg sided with the environmental groups and ruled that Duke was “simply refusing to comply with the controlling law.”

Read the N&O’s coverage from Wade Rawlins here.

Release from the Southern Environmental Law Center

Earlier release from Canary Coalition vowing non-violent protest