Sierra Club News:
New Mexico’s Environmental Improvement Board Friday passed a rule implementing the Energy Transition Act’s carbon limit on coal-fired power plants.
When the New Mexico Legislature passed the landmark Energy Transition Act in 2019, it included a provision to reduce harmful climate pollution from coal-fired power plants. The ETA instructed the board to issue a rule requiring new and certain existing coal plants to limit carbon-dioxide emissions to no more than 1,100 pounds per megawatt-hour on and after Jan. 1, 2023.
Hundreds of New Mexicans submitted written comments or spoke during the two-day hearing. Every single one of them urged the board to adopt environmental groups’ amendments to strengthen the Environment Board’s proposed rule.
The Sierra Club thanks the board for ensuring that the rule will go into effect by Jan. 1, 2023, as the legislature intended, and for adopting some changes to the Environment Department’s original proposal to ensure accurate and robust monitoring and reporting of CO2 emissions. In particular, the board adopted a rule to calculate the CO2 limit based on net electrical generation, rather than gross, as environmental groups had recommended. This change is important because Enchant has estimated that operating its carbon-capture equipment would consume about 365 MW of the 924 MW of power the two San Juan units would produce.
‘Unfortunately,’, the rule as adopted by the EIB could allow Enchant and the city of Farmington to restart San Juan Generating Station without installing pollution-control equipment, knowingly violating the ETA limit of 1,100 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent per MWh of electricity produced after Jan. 1, 2023.
Enchant and Farmington have stated their intention to operate San Juan after Jan. 1 without carbon capture, which would violate the ETA carbon limit. San Juan’s carbon emissions are about twice the 1,100-pound limit per megawatt-hour.
“The board rejected environmental and community groups’ common-sense proposal that San Juan operators should have to submit a compliance plan if the plant violates the carbon limit for 60 days,” Camilla Feibelman said, Sierra Club Rio Grande Chapter director. This recommendation was intended to prevent Enchant from operating San Juan after Jan. 1, 2023, without carbon capture and violating the ETA CO2 emission limit.
Environmental groups believe that a better approach is to require Enchant to install the pollution-reduction equipment needed to meet the CO2 limit before restarting the San Juan Generating Station — rather than to allow Enchant to violate the limit before CCS can be installed and then need to take enforcement action.
“San Juan Citizens Alliance will work diligently to ensure San Juan Generating Station never opens again and is decommissioned. The thought of allowing the coal plant to restart and emit 6 million tons of CO2 violates the intent of the Energy Transition Act and is blind to the renewable energy transition that the Four Corners region urgently needs. Thankfully, Enchant’s prospects of acquiring San Juan Generation Station have faltered,” Mike Eisenfeld said, Energy and Climate Program Manager, San Juan Citizens Alliance.
“The San Juan coal plant is the single greatest source of climate-warming carbon dioxide and smog-forming nitrogen-oxide pollution in our state. Allowing it to continue to operate for any period of time without emission controls that the Legislature required as part of the Energy Transition Act is unacceptable. We are disappointed that the Board did not firmly shut the door on this possibility. We will carefully consider every legal option at our disposal to protect New Mexicans from the harmful consequences of continued, uncontrolled emissions from the San Juan plant, and hope the Department does the same,” David Baake said, a Las Cruces-based attorney who helped represent the Sierra Club in the rulemaking.
“The Legislature’s promise to frontline, Indigenous, and environmental justice communities was that San Juan Generating Station would not operate past Jan. 1, 2023, without installing strict pollution controls that limit carbon dioxide emissions. The rule passed today by the Environmental Improvement Board breaks that promise and will allow Enchant Energy Corporation to game the system and operate without the required controls. We will explore all options to make sure San Juan Generating Station is required to operate consistent with the spirit and intent of the Energy Transition Act,” said Tannis Fox, senior attorney with Western Environmental Law Center.
