Ruling Puts Heat On Power Plant Cooling Systems
Court says running ocean water through turbines can't be allowed just because energy companies replace sea life.
Lee Peterson
The Daily Breeze
01/27/2007
In a victory for environmental activists, a U.S. appellate court has issued a ruling that could gradually wean coastal power plants from using ocean water to cool their hot steam turbines, a practice that kills fish and other sea life by the trillions each year.
The federal agency regulating the power plants' use of the ocean, rivers and lakes had no basis for letting electricity-generating stations off the hook by allowing them to continue sucking up the water if other measures were taken, such as replacing sea life with fish nurseries, the New York-based U.S. Court of Appeals, 2nd Circuit, ruled this week.
"It's going to be huge. It's going to direct the course of power plant siting and relicensing and permitting throughout the entire state," said Tracy Egoscue, executive director of Santa Monica Baykeeper. "It's a major victory for the environment."
Environmental groups have long maintained that the practice of siphoning up the water and running it through a power plant before discharging it back to the source is contributing to the decline of fish and other sea life populations, especially by killing the tiny fish eggs and larvae floating through the water.
The practice is used by the four coastal South Bay and Harbor Area plants from the LAX area to Terminal Island.
A number of groups, including Santa Monica Baykeeper, joined to sue the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for the rules it issued in 2004, which the environmentalists felt unfairly dismissed alternatives to once-through cooling.
The appellate court judges agreed, saying that the EPA should not have discounted as too expensive other cooling options, such as the "closed-cycle" process of pumping water from towers or a reservoir to the plant and then back again to cool off.
In years past, the El Segundo Power plant on Vista del Mar faced an enormous battle to win permission from the state Energy Commission to rebuild two of its four generating units and continue using once-through cooling.
Although opposed by environmental groups and Energy Commission staff, the plant, owned by NRG Energy, won permission for the project. NRG has yet to start that reconstruction, however.
